ALA Hostel

The staff were lovely, and the location is great with plenty of potential. Still, it looks as cheap as it costs. We stayed one night in the ground-floor dorm across from reception, which has 12 beds and feels very cramped. The beds were comfortable, but the linen wasn’t the cleanest. The bathroom was disgusting, with a clogged sink and very heavy moisture in the air. The shower was all right, but I didn’t feel clean after using it. The AC dripped constantly, like a tap, adding to the dampness. For a westerner travelling, I’d spend a bit more for somewhere nicer. This was okay for one night, two at most. If they charged a little more, they could put that extra money into fixing the place up.

We found bedbugs in our bunk beds at ALA Hostel. When we immediately asked the staff for a refund, it turned into a long battle before they finally agreed we should get the money back. They also refused to cover washing our clothes, which had bedbugs in them. The air conditioning didn’t work, so the room was very hot at night, and the blankets smelled unwashed. There was only one shared bath and toilet, inside the small room. It was incredibly dirty and damp, and made the rest of the room smell. They didn’t tell the other nine people in our room about the bedbugs and just let them keep sleeping there. I can’t recommend ALA Hostel. The staff were difficult to deal with, and it felt like they cared about getting money rather than our health and wellbeing.

It’s disgusting, and there are cameras in the room. The smell was so bad that it woke me up several times. They’ve drenched the place in mothballs to cover it, and I got a sore throat and sick from staying there. Look into naphthalene toxicity from mothballs. The bathroom smells even worse.

We found a dead bedbug and bedbug eggs in the bed, and the bathroom was extremely dirty. The water dispenser looked like it had never been cleaned. The staff were nice, but after all those problems we left without staying the night, so we didn’t find out whether any live bedbugs were still there. We’d booked a double bunk bed for one night, and it was the worst hostel experience I’ve had. There were two surveillance cameras in the dorm, with one pointed directly at the beds. At 21:00, a staff member came in without knocking and with no clear reason, apparently to mop the floor. When we challenged them, they said the camera had been turned off, but its red light was still on, so there was no proof it had stopped recording. I’d never seen anything like that, and CCTV in a bedroom is illegal.