Alto Hotel on Bourke

We got off to a bad start. Arriving late after a red-eye flight, I got attitude while checking in. Less than four hours later, a staff member woke us rudely to question how we had entered and gotten into the room. We left early because we felt uncomfortable, but they wouldn’t let us change the reservation, so we lost almost $800. They still called twice after checkout. One call was about plumbing leaks and whether they could enter the room. When I said we’d checked out, the staff member sounded confused and said they’d have to look into it. The room photos are misleading. The rooms are in poor condition, brown rather than white, with old bulbs that make the place feel more like a motel than a hotel. We asked for a king bed, but they just pushed two twins together. I had to go downstairs to ask for basic Wi-Fi. The signs in the elevator and rooms mention food you can order and breakfast, but that wasn’t true. Staff wouldn’t even look at me when I asked questions, and the manners weren’t there. The laundry room looked like a whole colony of spiders might come out of the machines.

On arrival, we found the air conditioners in our room weren’t working, but staff happily moved us to another room. The street is quiet and the location is great, very close to Southern Cross Station. I’d definitely stay again. The staff were friendly.

The bed was much too soft for me. I felt like I was sinking into a hole as I slept. The hotel is small, but it’s generous with supplies: plenty of tea and coffee sachets, tissue boxes, shower caps, and towel rails in the bathroom, which I often find lacking elsewhere. There are cups in the bathroom for brushing your teeth, plus free coffee from a barista machine and free fruit and cookies in the ground-floor lounge.

The receptionist was friendly and helpful, though the boss or manager always had a serious expression. We added another person to the booking and showed him the confirmation email, but he said the update wasn’t in the system, so the confirmation we’d received seemed to count for nothing. It’s a quiet place close to Southern Cross Station, about a 15-minute walk to China Town and 30 minutes to Federation Square. The room was very small for two people and couldn’t fit two suitcases; the bathroom was tiny too, with just enough room for one person between the basin in the middle, shower one step to the left, and toilet one step to the right. The decor was old and basic, which was fine, but the front door was so hard to open that we had to take turns pushing it.