Hotel Alimara

I'll itemize my likes:

1. The hotel is situated very close to a metro stop, hence downtown Barcelona is reachable within 10 minutes.

2. The room is nicely appointed with just what you need and the contemporary style furniture is pleasant. The bathroom is also nicely appointed. The maid cleans daily.

3. There is a mini-fridge in the room.

4. Just across the street there is a big grocery store, accessible from the lower level of the neighbourhood plaza. It has everything you need and it is affordable.

5. The restaurant at the hotel has a very good chef - some of his creations were utmost fine dining.

And now my dislikes:

1. The courtesy wireless internet in the lobby area is extremely slow. There are no courtesy computers to use. We had brought our laptop from Canada but were unable to buy museum tickets online because of the slow connection... kept trying for about one hour and a half.

2. After a long day of walking in Barcelona, at night we would have liked to watch something entertaining on TV before falling asleep. The only channels available in English were news - which we appreciated. But on other channels, all movies were voiced-over in Spanish (or Catalan?). Very frustrating. For comparison, I just went to Cuba in September and I could watch numerous English channels - and Cuba is much behind Spain in many respects.

3. The garbage bins in the room and bathroom were not lined with plastic bags, which is rather gross. Again by comparison to a Cuban 4-star hotel - there the garbage containers are lined every day with removable plastic bags. Now just imagine having banana peels or other slimy, juicy items making contact with the bin directly. And no, the containers were not properly cleaned after being emptied, but that is secondary to the basic need of lining a garbage container for hygienic purposes.

4. The hotel staff were slow to repair our in-room safe. We reported it not working on Sunday and had to keep reminding them about it. It was not fixed until Tuesday night. They do not keep permanent logs of items that need attention, so every day we would start our safe request anew.

5. The parking at the hotel is expensive (15 EUR per night). Luckily we were able to find parking on the street for the one night we needed it.

6. Last but not least, there are no coffee makers in the room. We always start our day early with coffee, had brought our favourite coffee from home to enjoy... no luck.

7. The bed mattresses are hard, I kept having hip pain at night.

To conclude, I would not go again to this hotel, even though there were many positive aspects about it, only because of the problems with wireless and the lack of entertainment-oriented English channels, which were major issues for us. If they fix these issues, I would certainly go again because the hotel is good value for the money.