Petit Hostel Palacio Real — Hotel in Madrid

Petit Hostel? More like Petty/Hostile. STAFF MEMBER STOLE MY STUFF. Someone with a universal keycard — presumably cleaning staff — opened my locker before checkout and removed 4 items. It was very odd because they CLEANED the locker, and they didn't take my bag. They took everything except my bag. The bag they left positioned neatly on the right side, whereas I had just shoved it in the middle. There had been some dirt and debris in the locker, but when I opened it, it was completely clean. There was nothing of great value there, but they also took things that were of almost NO value whatsoever, for example, two cables I'd found in the trash because I needed the copper wire for a repair. They also took a pair of my shoes, and a pair of my shorts. The most valuable thing in the locker was my bag itself, and they didn't take it.

I had locked the locker at around 1:30am and then I went to bed, closing the privacy curtain. I was catching up on sleep so I didn't really get up until around 11:55 when a staff member told me it was time to check out. I went down the ladder right then, and found that the locker was open. It's so bizarre.

Adding further weirdness to the tale is that my friend who was staying in the same room had her conditioner stolen and some salami stolen from the fridge. And then, when I went downstairs to the refrigerator to get my food before leaving, my bag, which had been knotted double and tied tight, was open, and ONLY my bottle of water was gone. Not the cheese. It was a bottle of water that had already been drunk from. 🤣🤣🤣

Is there a kleptomaniac member of the cleaning staff who steals things for the thrill of it? 🤣 I'm stumped. There was an almost $400 jacket of mine hanging up which they didn't touch — allthough, to be fair, I doubt they would have known that it was expensive. And they could have taken my toiletries but didn't.

The staff was then, initially, completely unhelpful. I asked them to check the lost and found area and they came back with a pair of red shorts that weren't mine. The woman who had been speaking with me then tried to pawn me off onto her fellow employee rather than continue to address the issue. In Spanish, she said, ”I have to go throw away these shorts!" Throw them away?? 🤣🤣 Very comforting. No wonder my sh*t is missing.

I asked how I could make a complaint knowing that all businesses legally have to give you a complaint document called a hoja de reclamación. They just gave me a generic email address and didn't offer the hoja de reclamación — which is illegal.

The second staff member told me, in reference to the theft: "It's a problem for us too. We know we can't leave things anywhere or someone will take them."

Contradicting this, the first staff member came back and said that there was no way anyone could have stolen the stuff because there are cameras everywhere. I said, "Great, check the cameras." At which point there was some nonsense about how I would have to call the police in order to have the cameras checked.

My entire 4-day trip should...

I would absolutely not recommend staying at this hostel. My friend and I were supposed to stay four nights here and ended up leaving on the second due to an intense feeling of unease and lack of safety that resulted from the running of the hostel and the set up of the rooms/functioning in general. First, the staff member we interacted with (which was only one due to them never being available) was rude, and was speaking openly about her negative opinions of certain nationalities in the hostel social area. Next, the majority of the rooms are teeny and in the basement with no windows and no functioning way to leave the building other than through the key-card door from which you enter the room. There is not good drainage or ventilation in the hostel which is exacerbated by the fact that you are in a basement. The hostel is also not very social, and there is nowhere casual to sit and chat with people or read a book, as the "social area" is not very appealing and is crowded by people trying to find a staff member to assist with check in. Finally, the main reason that we left was that the second night we were supposed to be there, the fire alarms went off from somebody presumably smoking in their room, but the alarm in our room did not work or go off, and the sound was quiet enough that the others in our room thought it was somebody's electric toothbrush. That, in addition to their being no way out of the room other than an electronics-dependent door, and there being no staff members to explain the smoke alarm activation or to alert that our alarm didn't work ultimately led to us leaving the hostel. The location is good, but there are so many other great places to stay in Madrid, and I would absolutely not recommend...

MOSQUITOES ALL OVER THE ROOM. DO NOT EVER STAY HERE. When I checked in around 3pm, what I didn't like was that the room was super small and there was no space in the shower to put your things while you showered. But the worst was when I returned to the room at night and the next morning. That night I got into bed (it was the top one on the bunk bed) and there were 2 mosquitoes flying around and a dead one in my bed. I managed to get the dead one out, kill one of the live ones, and one remained on the wall (it was difficult to kill and remove them because of the space). When I woke up in the morning, there were about 4-5 mosquitoes flying around me. When I got off the bunk bed, I saw the floor covered in dead mosquitoes, I almost stepped on them since I hadn't seen them at first. I asked one of the girls who checked in, but she said she hadn't noticed. Another girl told me that a lot of mosquitoes were coming in through the vent (I think it was the air conditioning vent), that they had been biting everyone for the previous few days and that now they had put in some mosquito poison. I went to the receptionist to tell her that the room was full of mosquitoes. At first, she acted surprised and ignored me. She continued straight to the kitchen. So I followed her and asked why she didn't tell me when I checked in that the room had a mosquito problem. But she continued acting surprised, as if she didn't know, saying that we'd have to call the exterminators. I think it's terrible that, knowing they had a room infested with mosquitoes, they let me check in without warning me. It's a health problem for all of us who stayed there. I have bites and redness from scratching so much. They should give us...