Hotel Fundador

The hotel has a good location. It is by no means a luxury hotel, but very decent. Rooms are big and very clean. Bathrooms are equipped with bathtub and shower. There are electric outlets in the room, but unfortunately none in the bathrooms. The hotel has two elevators which don’t operate properly. If you press the button for going upstairs and it shows doing so, it very often goes the opposite way! This is especially annoying if you stay in the higher floor and want to go to the breakfast room on the top floor. You enter the elevator and it goes downstairs! The breakfast is served in the top floor and is quite good. The view is spectacular! They have scrambled eggs, some cocktail sausages, cold cuts and cheese and some marmeladas. Coffee is decent . The big disappointment is the selection of fresh fruit. They only have water melon, the rest is canned fruit. The staff could be better at cleaning tables after guests. When there have been many people for breakfast, one has to go into the kitchen and ask them to refill food and clean tables . The staff stays in the kitchen and doesn’t follow what happens in the breakfast room! The hotel on the whole can be recommended for those who don’t have great demands and are happy with a basic clean hotel.

The place that is in the Photo is not the Hotel Fundador. That's photo is the Hotel Ancira, so it's very misleading. Once there the staff was very rude and poor customer service. As if that is not enough the room was very humid and the stench of fungi was unbearable and probably quite unhealthy. The fungus was growing all over the bathroom and walls. Quite disgusting, really. Don't recommend at all.

You may not find a better price in Monterrey (about 319 pesos -- about USD$25 -- per night when three nights are paid cash in advance). Depending on your tastes, you might not find a better location although you might find a quieter one. I have stayed at the Hotel Fundador several times, usually in the winter. I would say that at least half the staff recognizes me. They are friendly enough, but the hotel has no budget or even many employees. Let me get to the point about wintertime. Your choice is whether you want a window or heating; you cannot get both. Central heating is turned off, and the reception has two space heaters for its own use by the receptionist in a sweater. I used to always choose a room with a window, but you have to know that it gets quite cold in Monterrey in the winter and the hotel doors are ventilated, the windows may or may not seal, and the staff tends to open doors to the exterior every day and leave them open at night. When it is cold outside, it is just as cold inside. The only option you have is to ask for even more blankets. Finally, on my last stay, I actually got sick due to the cold. The hotel did accommodate me in moving me to an internal room with its own heater even though I was not able to move before checkout time. I kind of liked the caveroom; its translucent panels next to the door helped calm my claustrophobia. And the heater actually worked. The Hotel Fundador apparently used to be a nice hotel -- with a different name -- many years ago. What is left is a maze of rooms, mostly wood paneled, in different buildings abutting each other. There may be no furniture in your room, just some shelves attached to the wall. There will probably be no place to hang your clothes; you can try the television brace for that. Current ownership has no interest in maintenance. For example, although many bathrooms were the only parts of the hotel ever to be remodeled, drainage is terrible; one night a year or two ago, all the hallways and bathrooms on the third floor (!) flooded. This year, I could not take more than one hot shower a day as the drain was too slow. The flipside is, again, that this hotel is really cheap ... for downtown Monterrey, that is. The hotel used to have Wi Fi only in the lobby. Now there are signals available on different floors, but I had some problems getting a signal in the first room that I stayed in. The Hotel Fundador is located on the edge of the Barrio Antiguo, not one of its nicer streets. There are often teenagers and early twenty-somethings yelling and laughing in the streets at all hours on the weekend, as well as a loud and obnoxious "viene viene" or parking "assistant" holding court at the hot dog stand on the corner. One of the many clubs nearby likes to turn the volume up.