HF Keelung 61

For under NT$1500, the room quality was acceptable for the price. Mine smelled strongly of smoke, though. The building is a four-story apartment with no elevator, and it doesn't have proper guesthouse registration, so think twice before booking. I only ended up there after accidentally wandering into the jungle in Badouzi while hiking around the island. There are plenty of better places in Keelung, and a business can be honest without misleading people. It's a shame, so please don't come. My main problem is how the place is advertised. It uses high-quality pictures from other sources to get people to add it on LINE, then sends actual room photos and videos that look very different from what appears on Google. It also shows photos of fashionable women, though the guests I saw were often from rural areas.

The accommodation turned out to be tiny, so small you had to duck to move around. The bathroom wasn't in the room and had only a toilet, sink and showerhead, which made washing uncomfortable. The place was dirty, there were two cockroaches in the room, and not having a mirror was inconvenient. The whole stay was awful, and I've never had anything like it across so many bookings. Online accommodation details seem to be wrong almost every time, so think carefully before booking. We booked because the app listed an address in the city and had good reviews. The hotelier gave us an address three kilometers away from the actual lodging. We called seven or eight times with no answer, then drove to a community and asked someone there to call. The hotelier saw the call log but still didn't answer. He said he'd come pick us up, but we waited 20 minutes, exhausted after a day out and unable to find the place. I nearly thought it was a scam. When he arrived, he kept asking whether we wanted a sea-view room for an extra 300.

The bed and pillows were uncomfortable, and the shower pressure was weak enough that I had to soak my feet while showering. The room was fairly clean, but for the price it wasn't good value. At least the location was convenient for walking out to breakfast and other food the next morning. I stayed one night during the Double Ten holiday. The owner first showed me a room video, but there was no bathroom visible. When I asked, he said every room had a private bathroom. Then, just before check-in, he called and said I'd need to pay another 300 yuan to get a bathroom in the room, and asked me to transfer it. I was stunned. They should have been clear from the start that the room I'd booked had no bathroom. I felt cheated. The room itself was very ordinary, and the one they showed me was completely different from the one we actually got, which was apparently why the extra 300 was needed. The service was awful. I never met the owner. Later I looked up the place online, and it seemed not to be a legal guesthouse. The search only went up to 2012, though, so I don't know whether it became legal in 2013.

Are businesses like this even allowed to operate? Is it legal to run a bed and breakfast in a residential community, or to collect rent from guests while paying land value tax on owner-occupied residential land? Would you feel comfortable staying in one of these rooms?