Astoria Boutique Suites by BQA

"Terrible experience, no front desk, garbage leaky fluid on the floor, no AC"

"Do not book this place. It is not a boutique hotel. It is a dirty rent-a-room with a fancy name. The building smells bad. No lobby, no reception desk, no real check-in. You let yourself in with a phone call. The room had spider webs, a stained sofa, and a dirty floor. Nothing like the pictures. We paid six times what it was worth. Breakfast was listed as included. There is no breakfast. They send you to a bar down the street. Nobody tells you this in advance. When we complained: They promised a refund. Nothing arrived. The room was never cleaned. The manager was "unavailable" for three days. Two days of calls. One bed cover changed. That's it. They wait for you to give up. Don't give them the chance. Save your money and go somewhere else."

"We chose Astoria Boutique Suites because the price was comparable to the Wu and Parisi Udvar, and the location suited for personal reasons. The Booking.com listing looked convincing. The word "boutique" was used freely. What we found on arrival had absolutely nothing to do with any of it. The building looks like it survived a bombing, barely. The entrance is dark, dirty, and carries a smell I will not dwell on. There is no reception desk, no concierge, no lobby, no trace of any hotel experience whatsoever. Getting into our second-floor "suite" (a room... poorly furnished) took fifteen minutes because customer service is a single untrained person with a script and no capacity to actually help anyone. Self check-in. At five-star prices. The room itself bore no resemblance to the photographs. Spider webs in the corners, a stained sofa, worn curtains, a dirty floor. What had been presented as a boutique suite was the kind of room that rents for £50 a night in London. We paid six times that. Breakfast was listed as included. What was never disclosed is that the property has no breakfast facility. Guests are expected to walk around the block and eat at a nearby bar. This detail was mentioned nowhere in the listing. We immediately requested cancellation and reimbursement. They agreed to reimburse €110 for the breakfast, but we have not seen any funds yet... (a scam....) What followed over the next two days was a lesson in how a company can be structured entirely to avoid accountability. 1) A manager, we were told repeatedly, was unavailable for 3 days!! 2) We were promised a written reimbursement for the breakfast. No funds have arrived. 3) We asked for the room to be cleaned and listed the issues specifically. By 7pm nothing had been done. Customer relations insisted the room had been cleaned — until we sent photographs of the unmade bed. The next day, same story. Eventually someone came and changed the bed cover. Nothing else. In any major European city this situation would have been resolved within hours with a call from a manager and a partial refund. At BOA Budapest, the manager is a mythical figure who exists only to be referenced as unavailable. Shani Shamel is listed as the owner of this property in my linkedin account, and this chain. I would genuinely like to understand how she justifies a listing that misrepresents the product at every level, and a customer relations process designed to exhaust guests into giving up rather than resolving anything. Avoid this property. Avoid BOA Budapest entirely. And if you are considering anything that calls itself boutique in this city, verify independently before you book."