1st Hostel

Really, I’ve been in many hostels in Budapest and around the world, and this is BY FAR the WORST ONE I have ever seen. The owner is simply a criminal. No matter what you order, he will put you in a dirty dorm, with a SINGLE TOILET SHARED WITH OTHER DORMS!!! For instance, I ordered a triple room with private bathroom through hostelbookers. He put us in a room in an apartment, with a single toilet shared with other three dorms! And to exit our room, we had to enter another room in which some guys were sleeping there! Despite in the booking website the property address was “Sìp Utca 5”, the owner will bring you to a different address (Kossut Lajos 11), and if you complain for what he gives you, he is not willing to give you back the deposit and the only choices you’ll have are either to stay on the street (losing the 15% deposit you paid with the booking website) or to stay in that dirty apartment. He also does not understand well English (or he pretends to...). The apartment has four dorm rooms, with different capacities. One of the four dorms has no private doors, and it is rather a passage for other two dorms (still it has beds and the owner will put guests there...). Despite such a HUGE number of beds, there is JUST ONLY ONE TOILET. Dirty as hell. Excrements are even on the OUTER side of the bowl (you’ll have to CLEAT IT BY YOURSELF if you don’t want to soil your legs and pants...). Then, the shower is in another room (no toilet bowl there) and there is a bathtub in another room (no toilet bowl there too...). In the drain of the shower, there is a ball of hairs... The bathtub is dirty dirty dirty, really, disgusting!!! I can’t understand if the brown on the bathtub was mud or dead human skin (or a mixture of it with soap). Really an obscenity! And if you use the bathtub, the bathroom will be flooded with some centimeters of water, which will eventually leak to the next dorm!!! Over the bathtub there is a gas heater, which I don’t think it follows the EC regulations... And in that bathroom there is NO window to have fresh air for the gas heater, with SERIOUS possibility of carbon monoxide intoxication (with possibility of death). Moreover, in the first day the heater didn’t work at all, so cold water for everyone! Toilet paper is a precious good, and the owner will give you as few rolls as he can. We had to buy it from a shop. The room we stayed in was REALLY REALLY REALLY dirty. Dirty linen (have the sheets ever seen the washing machine in their life?!? I guess NEVER, and there were some blood-like stains), dirty pillows, dirty beds, dirty floor, dirty walls. Our window was broken and it was fixed with adhesive tape... Of course there are no window shutters so you the room will be illuminated as soon as the sun rises... Beside the acoustic isolation is absent, so you will hear every single car passing during the night (the Kossut Lajos street goes to the Erzsebet bridge, which one of the most congested bridges of Budapest). The lamp switch had no cover (with risk of electrocution) and under the beds there were many bottles... Despite the description stated that there were security lockers, there were none! And of course, forget any towel. Well, I guess the absence of towels was a good thing, because I can’t even imagine how dirty they could have been! I also think that there were some kinds of bed-bugs because one friend of mine found himself itchy and with red bites after the first day he slept there... But let’s start from the beginning. We made the triple room with private-bathroom reservation, and we received the next day the confirmation from hostelbookers and from the property. When we were on the road to Budapest, I received an SMS asking to tell when we were arriving there. I replied. Then we arrived in Sìp Utca 5, i.e. the address, which was written in the email and in the hostelbookers’s website. No sign of the apartment, no door bell, no nothing! So I made an (expensive, due to roaming) call to the number from which I received the SMS, and he arrived 10 minutes later. Then he brought us to Kossut Lajos Utca 11, which is half a km away from the original address. Then the nightmare began. The hostel is instead a dirty apartment in a dirty building, with many dorms and a single toilet for all the guests. We asked if at least the apartment was empty. Of course it wasn’t, a dormitory was already full. We saw the beds on a passage, and I asked the owner if people were about to come there, and he said “no”. Instead, next day, two guys came in! (Folks, they booked a PRIVATE double room, they got a CORRIDOR!). At a certain point of our staying, there were 13 persons in the same apartment, sharing A SINGLE TOILET! Then, the owner wanted me to pay for 100% of the price, despite I already paid with hostelbookers 15% as deposits! Then, I showed the email, and only after that, he agreed to make me pay the remaining 85%. But he used HIS eur-huf exchange rate (despite in the email it was CLEARY WRITTEN what we had to pay in Hungarian forints!!!). So we had to pay even MORE for this disgusting flophouse! Of course, we had to pay in cash forints, of course to avoid taxes. I also said to the owner that we had paid for a triple room with PRIVATE bathroom, but he said that it was all full and he could not give us a better room. According to the terms&conditions of the website, he should have: 1) notice us with reasonable advance that he could not accommodate us, allowing us to cancel the reservation. 2) Alternatively, find another accommodation (with no extra charges), which was the same or better what we booked (triple room with private bathroom). He just offered two choices: 1) Having our cash back (but it was just 85% of what we paid), without having the 15% deposit back, and go on the street, because he was not willing to give/find us another accommodation. 2) Accepting this ugly accommodation. Unluckily, after 11 hours of car driving, at 10pm we had no other choices and we had to accept to stay in that ugly place for such a huge cash amount. We asked the other guest, and they also were scammed by this criminal owner, and indeed they were defrauded too, by not getting (with other hostel booking websites, pointing to the same property) what they ordered. Honestly, folks, I have been in other hostels, and they were way much cleaner and cheaper than this “thing”. If you are willing to get a private room with private bathroom, STAY AWAY from 1 ST APARTMENTS, you won’t get any private bathroom! Even if you are willing to get a private room with a shared bathroom, DON’T GO to 1 ST Apartments, because you might not even get a private room, but a dorm or a corridor! I’ve been also on hostels (in the same district!) with shared bathrooms and they were not only way much cleaner, but also cheaper. And there were a lot of bathrooms there, so there was no toilet-sharing problems! And even if you are looking for a bed in a dorm room... really the prices are way too high for the quality, really. This property should be used as an example of house of horrors. Lastly, don’t be fooled by the pictures posted by the owner. Maybe these were taken many years ago, but the truth is completely different!

I've been in a Budapest with a my friend for almost five days. We had booked a private chamber in this "hostel" more than 2 weeks before but when we have arrived in Sip Utca, n.5, there was no one. We call the number of the hostel and after 30 minutes they took us in a horrible apartament in Kossuth Lajos, 11. They didn't give us a private chamber, as we had booked online, but a couple of dirty and squalid beds in a room without doors, where every person had to walk to reach the bathroom and the exit-door. We've paid about 40€ (obviously without receipt) together at night for this: these are robbers. On the ceiling there were a lot of cracks and water infiltrations, hidden by posters. Maybe they have never washed bed blankets and sheets: they put the too dirty ones in armchairs, we say this disgustive show. It was a hell. Keep out from this hostel!

We waited more than one hour for the receptionist that should gave us room keys but he didn't come. He stopped answering the phone (to all three numbers we had) and to SMS. They overbooked our room and they didn't tell us! We met other guys from that hostel and they showed us their room: nothing to do with the photos you see here, dirty and damn stinky (and they got a shared 8 bed room without bathroom when they booked a 4 bed room with bathroom). Very shady organization. We understand that there was an huge demand of rooms on the 1st of May, but this is unacceptable.