Amsterdam Hostel Annemarie

The hostel is cheap, in a really nice location, and the staff were genuinely kind. Still, a lot of my interactions with other guests felt strange or uncomfortable. I was the only one in the 15-bed dorm until 3am, when a man sharing the room came in swearing and yelling, then talked to himself through the night. As a solo female traveller, I didn't feel safe. I told the front desk staff when I checked out, but they didn't ask anything or seem concerned. I was there for only 2 nights, so maybe I was just unlucky. Also, there's no real kitchen, just a microwave for cooking.

The overall impression is that the owner doesn't want to fix basic problems or provide basic services. The room has no working ventilation, its door doesn't lock when closed, and the key is useless for locking it. Beds are too short even for normal-sized people, and the sheets don't cover the blankets. You can't lock the lockers either. The WiFi modem doesn't work. The "kitchen" lacks the basic things a kitchen needs, and the "garden" lacks the basic things a garden needs. And so on. Yes, the reviews are right, it's pretty horrible.

The people running the hostel were lovely, but Room 1 was really noisy. You could hear people coming and going all night, so maybe ask for another room. The toilets and beds are quite small too.

The bites we noticed all over us the day after leaving were too uncomfortable, and having to quarantine our luggage after travelling was too much to ignore. We’re sure they came from bed bugs. We’d actually seen a bug in my friend’s bed and thought nothing of it at the time, since we were having so much fun in Amsterdam. After looking it up, we were sure it was a bed bug. The other reviews make it seem like there’s an unresolved bed bug problem despite many complaints. It’s a shame, because the service was kind and helpful, and the amenities seemed clean and as expected for a hostel. They also let us switch rooms without any fuss after another guest disrespected my friend’s ethnicity. We wanted to leave a good review, and if they fixed this, it’d be where I’d stay whenever I go to Amsterdam.