Art Hotel Athens

The rooms were okay, and Athens’ best areas felt a bit far away. The staff were lovely, though, and breakfast was wonderful.

We had a great stay, and I’d come back mainly for the staff. They were incredibly helpful and friendly. Miranda, the manager, if I remember her name right, was especially kind and let us keep the room until 8 pm while we waited for our airport pickup. When we had an air-conditioning problem, they fixed it straight away. The hotel is a little dated, but it’s clean and the maids came every day. There’s a small pool and sun loungers on the sixth floor, though we chose to spend our time exploring Athens. We walked to Plaka in about 20 minutes and went there every day for the bars and restaurants. There were quite a few homeless people around, but they were harmless and caused us no trouble. My husband and I had a really good experience.

The staff were lovely and clearly trying hard, and the room had a large terrace. But the hotel needs a lot of improvement and definitely didn’t feel like four stars. Our room was tiny and dated, with hardly any space or sockets for four people to charge phones. The terrace table was close to collapsing, though oddly enough the jacuzzi bath worked. The pool seemed neglected. At breakfast they ran out of glasses and spoons, and staff were scrambling to bring guests disposable paper cups. There wasn’t much choice of food, either. At 9 pm someone knocked on our door, it was TV technicians asking to check the signal because guests in the next rooms said they had none. And there were bed bugs. We stayed two days and got bitten from head to toe. Management needs to deal with this. I saw other reviews mentioning the same thing, but chose to ignore them because we’d stayed at other Art Hotels in Europe without problems.

I didn’t feel safe walking around outside this hotel. It’s in a very sketchy part of town, with lots of people stumbling around on drugs, and it’s far from Athens’ main attractions and restaurants.