Hotel Aparta Suite Continental

Apartment 804, where I rented a room, was very nice, and I liked the location and room. I stayed for a week in April 2025. It seems many apartments have independent owners, so their condition can vary. The main issue was the shower water. It only got lukewarm, which was uncomfortable on typical cold Bogota mornings. There are several homeless people on the streets at night, but I didn’t find the area particularly dangerous, especially with a 24-hour police post just one block away.

The room felt like a barebones two-star Econolodge, and the hotel doesn’t even provide ice or filtered water. The building is very old and looks like it hasn’t been renovated since 1990, nowhere near a four-star hotel. The next morning I checked out and moved to Viajero Hostel, which was cheaper and had a nicer place with a sauna and steam room. I booked online ten minutes after midnight, but the computer would only let me reserve for the following day. When I arrived at 3am, the rude lady manager, who I believe was lying, said only the deluxe suite was available and wanted another $100 on top of my reservation price. I barely saw any other customers, and I know for a fact at least 30% of the hotel was empty. I felt I had no choice but to pay, since the neighborhood seemed very sketchy at night, with drug addicts and homeless people walking around and graffiti on every wall. I wasn’t going to walk the streets at 3am with heavy suitcases and $1000 in cash in mine.

For all three days, there was no Wi-Fi in the room. You need it for flights, shuttles, lodging, Uber, restaurants, tours, mobile tickets, maps, calls home, weather and emergencies. Having to return to the lobby or a restaurant you’d already visited to get online is unacceptable. Everything else was great: the location, staff, security, room, bed, blackout drapes, quiet, kitchen, showers and cost.

The people working there were really nice, but the apartment was a mess. It’s not a four-star hotel: things were old, broken or cheap, and many listed items, including the kettle, oven and drying machine, weren’t there. Much of the equipment that was there didn’t work, so the kitchen was basically unusable. The old hob took 30 minutes to boil water, the fridge either froze everything even on minimum or leaked, and the coffee machine was broken. Plates, cups and glasses were plastic, and Netflix was shared among multiple tenants, so sometimes I couldn’t use it. The advertised “view over inner garden” was a joke because of the huge vis-a-vis. It also wasn’t kid-friendly at all, and the floor-level windows wouldn’t close properly.