"If I could go back, I would have changed hotels on day one.
I planned this trip for months. My parents are older, they don't speak English or Spanish, and I wanted to give them a comfortable few days in Barcelona. A 4-star hotel with good reviews seemed like the right call. I requested a higher floor and a quiet room when I booked. We ended up on the second floor, right beside the elevator. Not ideal, but I understood it was a preference.
What I didn't expect was the bathroom. Something smelled off from the second morning. I went downstairs, explained the problem nicely, and asked if they could move us. "We'll take care of it while you're out," they told me. So we went out, explored the city, and came back that evening expecting it to be sorted.
It wasn't. Nothing had been touched. I called the front desk again. This time someone actually came up. They looked around, said the issue needed a proper repair, and asked if we could step out. We'd literally just walked through the door after a full day of walking. We couldn't. So they did the work right there in the room while we sat on the beds. When they were done, the room smelled worse than before, just differently. They'd gone heavy on the air freshener. My head was pounding. I opened the window for air and realized the window looks directly into the elevator shaft area. People walking by could see right in. So that was the trade-off: headache or no privacy.
Here's the thing that really got me. Over two days, staff came into that bathroom several times. Inspected it, repaired something, checked again. Not one person found the actual problem. On checkout morning, as I was getting ready to leave, I noticed water sitting around the base of the toilet. It had been leaking. That was almost certainly the source of the smell the entire time. I also spotted mold running along the edges of the shower enclosure. Not the kind that appears in three days. That had been growing for a while.
The smaller issues kept piling up too. We had no shampoo for the entire stay. Three nights. Housekeeping came in every day, tidied the room, and left without noticing. I genuinely thought the hotel just didn't provide it and washed my hair with shower gel the whole time. On our last evening, I came back to find only one bathrobe in the room. There had been two that morning, neatly folded. Nobody explained where they went. And on more than one occasion, I knocked back with "just a moment" when staff came to the door, only to have it opened on me anyway.
I wrote management an email while still at the hotel. They sent someone up at 8 PM on our final night. The offer was to switch rooms or have drinks at the bar. At 8 PM. On our last night. With my elderly parents already settled in for the evening. I said no to both.
After checkout, I sent another email with photos of the toilet leak and the mold. The response was a refund of fifty euros and an invitation to come back at a discounted rate. On a stay that cost over thirteen hundred euros. I asked for one night refunded. They told me the room had been "functional" and that because I'd booked through a third party, their options were limited.
I spent the following week going back and forth with Agoda. Four separate conversations. The hotel didn't respond to a single one of Agoda's messages. Agoda eventually told me they couldn't do anything without the hotel's cooperation.
Every single conversation, every phone call, every email, every chat session with customer support was handled by me alone. My parents had no idea what was going on half the time. I was translating situations, managing complaints, and trying to keep the trip from falling apart. It wasn't the vacation any of us had imagined.
The people working the front desk were consistently warm and professional. I have no complaints about them as individuals. But this room had problems that predated our arrival, and the way management handled it never matched the seriousness of what we experienced."
