Hlemmur Square

Worst hostel experience ever: beware of shared roo

This review is about the two floors of the hotel which are a hostel, not a hotel. They lend you a tiny (nearly a joke, I guess) lock to put on the small cubby boxes in the room. 1000ISK deposit. The kitchen contains dishwashers.

I stayed in a room with 12 or 14 beds. The doors on these rooms are "underdamped", meaning they are designed or adjusted to slam very very loudly if you let them close by themselves. It shakes not just the room, but is even obnoxious during the day if you're in a common kitchen or lounge down/across the hall. The door in my room was slammed AT ALL HOURS of the day except 12h30 -- 03h00 a.m. by the absurdly inconsiderate guests. The problem is that there is no effort by the hostel to tell people how to behave, and for some reason a large cross-section of the sample of young travellers in my room seem entirely oblivious to the surely-obvious effects of their actions on other people. There were no quiet hours announced. No one was told to close doors quietly. I was dumbfounded how people stayed up shouting, drinking, etc inside the dorm room (there are couches) until midnight, even when others were obviously trying to sleep, and the same people when they were on a different schedule, were up at 03h a.m. sharp talking loudly, and slamming the door countless times again. I mentioned to the staff that there was an educational solution (maybe) to this problem, but they didn't seem very interested. In addition to all that, the rooms, which look nothing nice as clean as in the pictures online (of course), have little cubby boxes below the beds where you supposedly can lock your valuables. The locking tabs are a bit of a joke, maybe, but in my room several were actually broken off anyway, so there was no way to lock them. This was my worst hostel experience ever.