Hotel de la Opera — Restaurant in Bogota, Capital District

Guests be warned. This hotel is by no means deserving of its "Five Star" accolade. Rooms and bathrooms are dirty and dated, in this poorly restored and poorly maintained, yet once beautiful, old building. Staff are constantly frazzled and no one speaks English with much capacity, and yet shockingly the clientele is generally older American and UK/English folk. Very few rooms have air conditioning and are therefore quite stuffy and warm, even in Winter. Mattresses should be thrown out, they're the oldest and least comfortable thin and firm things you could imagine - an abomination for a five star hotel to present to their guest. The hotel regularly loses power, which further hinders and complicates it's already spotty Wi-Fi. One morning the hotel just "did not have hot water" with no reason given and when one other guest approached the front desk and asked to have a space provided to shower that morning the reception stated that while all of the building didnt have hot water, they would "look for a room". And then when the guest left they discussed how there were no such rooms and they would just wait. The hotel has a "spa"... sort of... downstairs in the basement they have the world's tiniest gym, pool, and a sauna / steam room. However, the entry to this area feels like a place guests are not allowed, and seems closed - and if you manage to make it, you'll be greated in a confused manner by someone who acts like you shouldn't be there and a confusing front desk situation. So there's no chance of comfortable stroll down to the spa to just relax on your time during your stay.

Lastly, and this is important. This hotel's breakfast (and likely their entire restaurant kitchen) violates MANY food safety regulations and standards. Cross contamination gone wild. Foods set out since over 1 hour before breakfast even starts, (6:30am) it stays out, unrefreshed and not chilled until well past noon, every day. The guests regularly drop the tongs and utensils onto the floor and then return them to the tables, which I witnessed multiple staff members also noticing, and not replacing the dirty floor utensils. The restaurant food is tremendously underwhelming and entirely not worth eating at, for anyone.

Genuinely, you should reconsider before staying here. This area of La Candelaria is mostly museums and government buildings - there's no benefit to staying at this location, you have to walk quite far to all the restaurants, stores, tours, and bars you want to check out. Plus this area is mostly filled with Hostels, this is generally not an area where someone seeking a "nice hotel" would want to stay anyhow, so skip the hotel on that ground if you were already on the fence before reading...

Unfortunately, this is what happens when managers stop maintaining the quality of the hotel to the current world standards. The hotel has a lot of great features like the building architecture and the views, and most of the staff are very friendly and helpful. But! There are so many little things that add up and completely contradict the hotel's claim of being "one of the best accommodations in the city". Good news, majority of all these flaws are easily fixable and I truly hope this gorgeous building can return to its prior glory. So here we go...

While some staff speaks English, the person at the front desk does not. For the hotel that generously puts 5 stars on every piece of merchandise they have, that's not a good start. We got a room with a bathtub to relax after multiple days of hikes. I can't describe my confusion when I saw stickers at the bottom of the bathtub (intended not to slip if you are having a shower) pretty much made of the material you would use to scrub you feet. Nevertheless, I decided I would give a go to this modern day torture machinery and was yet again disappointed when the water coming out of the tap was hardly warm. The water pressure was so low that bath foam did not even foam. What a treat it was... To find other ways of relaxation, we made our way to the spa area. The Harry Potter closet is a luxurious mansion comparative to the size of the gym (it would be better for the reputation of the hotel to remove this embarrassment of a gym from the 80's all together). Hammam and sauna were of a wrong temperature (hammam too hot, sauna not hot enough, and no ability to change the temperature), with hammam steam having a lot of essential oils in it (tree oil?) which made it very difficult to breathe. Oh, and my favorite part is that you have to wear a swimming cap in the pool. If you don't have one, the hotel will conveniently sell it to you for a couple of dollars. It should be easy to be honest - if you can't afford good filters in the pool in a very Soviet style, you can't pretend to be a lux hotel. And to top my day, I tried to ask front desk for a cup of tea in the evening. My very demanding request was denied with a response that the restaurant is closed, because apparently you need a chef to boil a kettle and deliver a tea bag.

In any case, I really do believe all of these are low hanging fruits to fix (and the hotel already has a great foundation to do so), because often the small things are those that matter for the...

So many things to talk about this hotel

Very slow response to the message via booking.com. We asked whether we should pay the airport transfer driver in USD or Cpeso because they quote us back in both currency. Someone response next day after arriving.

Tried to connect to wifi but couldn't get it to work. Turned out they missed spell the surname (need room no., surname and email for connecting) even though they clearly have a correct spelling on booking.com

Lack of privacy in the room, especially bathroom because if you don't close window or curtain, someone from opposite building will see you. So even you turn the lights on it still make the room dark and feel confined.

Decided to try pool and spa. The spa was good and warm but you had to asked staff to turn it on every time. The switch is outside. The pool was not practical for swimming. It was too small and too warm. Oh wanted to hop into sauna. Open the sauna door was fine, but once you want to close it the metal handle and frame was so hot. It almost burned my hand. I showed the staff what happened she nodded and then back to their phone.

There was a water container with plastic cups next to the pool and directly in front of reception. But if you want to drink water, forget it because it had never been filled all 4 days I was there. There were used plastic cups scattered around some on the floor and on the table, but staff were too busy with their phone to do anything else.

Once shower, the bathroom floor was soaking wet

Second day we came back to rest early afternoon, but there was a function in the middle courtyard. We could clearly hear people talking, plate and cutlery noise. So we had to suck it up till 3pm. The room door has zero sound proof.

there were also some minor things like room attendant gave wrong type of coffee pouch for the coffee machine, never replace another set of bath foam, we put towels for them to replace after 2 days of use but they fold them back pretend it was a new one. I knew because it was stll a little wet.

Breakfast was average.

$19 for a shaving kit. What a joke!!!

So bottom line : only good thing was location. But if you are so desperate for a useless pool, please go for it. There are much better options out there in close walking distance to square and...