How a Hotel Ruined Athens

I’m at least a little demanding when I travel. I’ll admit that.

For example, when I go to a restaurant and order a ribeye, I do not like when they come back with a hamburger.

Likewise, when I reserve a room at a hotel, I expect them to put me in the agreed upon room, preferably with some resemblance to the photos on the website.

I understand that sometimes there are hurdles on the road. Our airplane was running late, putting us into Athens with just enough time to catch the last Metro into the city. We were later than expected, but it was not a big deal. 

We felt pretty confident in our planning. We had booked the Attalos Hotel more than a month earlier, and reviews on both Booking.com and TripAdvisor.com were outstanding. The photos showed a variety of rooms, so we requested one with a double bed and a single bed since there are three of us traveling now.

Attalos Hotel responded when we sent an email to let them know we would be arriving late, and they said it was not a problem, adding helpful directions via Metro, bus and taxi. We were delighted.

But when we arrived at 1 a.m., we went upstairs and found a dingy room that was just big enough for the three twin beds they had crammed in.

Now, I understand that rooms in Europe are generally smaller than those in the U.S., but this one was a fire hazard. And that was before we added our luggage.

We went back downstairs to ask for the correct room. The man at reception was nice enough, but he shrugged his shoulders and said that was the only room available.

After we showed him the photos from Booking.com, none of which looked anything like the room we had been given, he shrugged again.

He said he couldn’t do anything, but we were welcome to bring it up to the manager the next morning. Not exactly the customer service that so many people talked about in their reviews.

We were questioning whether our luggage would actually fit anywhere other than on the beds with us, and we explained again that what we booked was not what we were given.

He shrugged again and repeated that he had no rooms available. He said there was nothing he could do.

Knowing this was going nowhere and that he had no power to fix the problem, we suggested he call someone who could take care of the problem. He looked incredulous. In fact, he looked frightened.

I have had my share of problems at hotels over the years and throughout the world. Almost without question, the problem was fixed quickly, either by changing my room or booking me in a comparable hotel and covering the difference of the rate if it was higher than I originally booked. A hotel in Cusco, Peru even paid for our night’s stay in a different hotel after realizing that they had mistakenly given away our confirmed room.

This idea of booking us into another hotel seemed completely foreign to the receptionist. We are in Greece, so it probably was.

However, if he couldn’t fix the problem, we needed someone who could.

It took some coaxing, but he finally managed to find someone he said was the owner.

They spoke to each other in Greek, as the receptionist explained the situation. Then he handed me the phone.

The “owner” said there was nothing he could do. I again pointed out that the photos and description on Booking.com did not remotely represent what was in the room they had given us.

During at least one point, I may have raised my voice a little when I suggested that the “owner” was completely and totally interrupting me.

It was not a pleasant conversation.

Finally, he said that we had two choices: either we could take the room we were given, or the receptionist could help us book a room nearby. But he made a point of saying that we would be paying the price of the new hotel, regardless of how much it cost.

It was late, and I was tired. This clearly was not going to work out, so I handed the phone back to the receptionist, ready to take our chances on somewhere eles.

They spoke a little longer and hung up.

That’s when the receptionist told me what the owner had said: “He said he promised you that if you stayed in the room we have tonight, we can give you a good room tomorrow.”

It wasn’t ideal – and it wasn’t what he told me – but it sounded like a decent compromise.

We went to the room, and I stacked some furniture in the closet to make enough room for our bags.

I am not exaggerating.

As we were leaving the next morning, the daytime receptionist said that they would move our bags to the new room as soon as it was ready, and we could just pick up a new key when we finished our tour of Athens.

When we got back, she handed us the key and told us that the “manager” had requested to see us.

Figuring it was an olive branch, we headed up there. He said, “Is your new room all right?”

I said that we had not been up there yet, so he asked us to return after we had seen it.

We went up and found a suite with two small rooms. One had a double bed, and the other had two twins. There was also a balcony (which was almost as big as the first room we had been given) that had a lovely view of the Pantheon in the distance.

It seemed that the Hotel Attalos had more than made up for the issues the night before, and I headed down to the “manager’s” office to thank him.

He quickly cleared off one of the chairs across his desk and motioned for me to sit.

That’s when I started sensing that this was not going the way I anticipated.

“Last night, you were very unpolite (sic) to me and unpolite (sic) to my receptionist,” he said. “I don’t need to stand for being treated that way.”

Seriously? This wasn’t a mea culpa. This was a trip to the principal’s office. It also struck me as strange that the “owner” I had spoken to the night before was now the “manager.” Either way, I certainly did not like his tone.

At this point, I was fired up. I repeated that it was the hotel that gave us a different room than we had booked. A woman at a nearby desk began chirping at us, too.

Now, it was me who must have looked incredulous. What seemed to be an acceptable solution had plummeted into the most unpleasant hotel experience I have ever had.

As I was asking again about their blatant misrepresentation on Booking.com, which appears to be their primary source of their bookings, the woman chirping nearby continually interrupted me, just as the “owner/manager” had the night before. I again may have raised my voice slightly, when I requested that she not interrupt me.

Of course, my favorite moment came when the “owner/manager” claimed that they did not have rooms such as the ones pictured on the website. I’m not sure if he knew what he was saying or not, but it did make me pause.

In the end, our friend Karyn looked at the hotel employees and/or owners and asked, “What good did it do for you to call us in here? You seemed to have appeased the situation, and now you’ve made it much, much worse. I, for one, am tired of standing here while you waste even more of our time in Athens than you already have.”

With that, Karyn left. She made a great point, so both Fran and I followed.

It’s really too bad. Everyone we met in Athens – aside from those at the Hotel Attalos – were kind, inviting and enjoyable to be around.

But because of the sour taste left from dealing with the people at Hotel Attalos, we decided to cut our time there short.

Instead we opted to add an extra day on the coast in Nafplio. I spoke with the owner of the hotel there, and she was happy to have us early. She even offered to upgrade our room (it already had more beds than we needed) since we were staying longer.

I’m really looking forward to staying there.