Mimoza İstiklal Apart Hotel

The room is on the small side, though it should work for one couple in the main bedroom and one person on the large sofa bed. The owner was very friendly and helpful, and changed the towels every day. The location is great, close to Taksim but calm at night, with restaurants and a 24h shop beside the hotel. It’s a good-priced place to sleep while touring Istanbul, and I recommend it.

Be warned, they may cancel your booking and leave you without a place to stay. Our credit card was hacked, so the bank had to cancel it. Booking.com told us the card securing the reservation was invalid. We immediately added a new card to Booking.com and informed the hotel, and they acknowledged the message. The next day they cancelled our booking, leaving us scrambling to find somewhere else. If this had only happened to us, perhaps it would be easier to accept, but I’ve seen at least 3 other Google reviews describing the same thing. Finding another place at the last minute isn’t easy. If having accommodation when you arrive isn’t that important to you, take a chance with this place.

The listing photos were really nice, and when we contacted the owner, he said the place would suit our family. On arrival, though, it was neither nice nor clean, and it didn’t meet our family’s needs. The description and pictures seemed deliberately misleading: the ad showed a different apartment in the same building. It wasn’t sanitary. We found cockroaches, sewer flies, old soap, shower dirt, mold around the showers and sinks, rust on the mirrors, oily and dirty utensils and dishes, a broken countertop, a broken shower wall, stained bed sheets, and ripped towels.

This was the home of Nazım Hikmet Ran, the greatest poet of all time...