Life in Barcelona

I think we must have staying at completely different hotels. I have just returned from my first trip to Bacelona and i stayed in the Hotel Actual. I thought it was great, pure and simple and in my opinion I could not have stayed in a better hotel.

I thought the room was REALLY clean and comfortable. The staff were incredibly polite and helpful and made me feel really welcome the second I walked into the hotel.

I also liked being so close to the centre and because of this I was impressed with the amount of the city I was able to see and experience.

I would definately stay there again and I have already recommended it to some of my friends going to Barcelona!

 

I recently stayed in the Hotel Actual at the beginning of December 2006. I arrived in the evening and I was greeted by a very friendly lady at the reception desk (who's English was very good). Check-in was fast and I was given the key for room 110, on the first floor.

After a quick ride in the elevator (being the lazy git that I am), I went to my room for the week, opened the door and rolled my suitcase into the bedroom, where I had a nice surprise...

There he was: Bob.

'Who's Bob?', you might ask. Bob is someone I have grown very fond of in the short time we spent together. Bob is a cockroach of roughly 2 inches in size, with a brown/blackish haze over his skittery physique. He was lurking behind the bedroom door when I first arrived.

Thinking pictures of Bob would undoubtedly prove useful, I took my camera out of my bag and snapped a few shots of the little fellow. Then I decided that Bob had spent enough time walking on the face of this planet, and I went to the bathroom to get a massive wad of bog roll (yes, I'm very heroic) to squish Bob and send him to the hotel rooms in the sky, where he could spend the rest of his eternal cockroachy life with his friends.

Sadly, when I went back into the bedroom, Bob had dissapeared. Bob was never seen again, but for the rest of the week I watched the floor of the hotel room intensely when walking around, as I did not really want Bob to end up splattered against the bottom of my foot.

Back to the room! My room was a comfortable twin room (beds put together to create a double bed) with a tv, looking very modern and overall quite nice. Shame that one of the two sets of sheets was stained. With stained I mean yellow stains and orange streaks of... orange stuff on one half of the bed. Interesting! I decided I wasn't going to sleep on that side.

I can't recommend staying in either room 110 or 111, as they are both located next to the breakfast area and a storage room. This meant that I couldn't get a good night's sleep all week, as people having breakfast and staff accessing the storage room kept waking me up. One of my travel companions who was staying on a different floor said she did not have any disturbances like that at all, so keep that in mind when you go.

The room heating is basically a 'hot' or cold air system, but even when I turned mine off, there was still a distinct fan noise coming from the ceiling panel behind the air vent. My best guess is that the air tunnel for an adjacant room ran over my room and it was just tough luck.

'Gee, you're a whiney git, aren't you?'. Well... maybe. I would recommend a stay in the hotel in summer, as the rooms are tiled and the walls are made out of some type of slate, so it's nice and cool. I just think the cockroach, dirty sheets, noisy environment and the constant noise of the heating system was a bit too much to be able to enjoy myself. The bathroom was a tad cramped in my opinion.

The Hotel is just one block away from the Diagonal (right next to the Diagonal Metro Station - Green line)and a 25 minute walk from the Plaza Catalunya (or a couple of minutes on the metro). The staff is very friendly and your room will be cleaned to a very high standard every day.