Hotel Principal - 5am wake up call

Mr. Volker Weber’s story inspired me to finally sit down and write about our extremely unpleasant experience at Hotel Principal in Barcelona.

Our story is about a common hotel service known as a wake up call. In our case, a 5am wake up call.

Unfortunately, and also in our case, that 5am wake up call never took place. As a result, we missed our flights and had to buy entirely new tickets costing us each :e350.

Shit does happen when you travel but you do not expect to face an entire hotel staff, from receptionists to their manager Oriol Domingo, refusing to take any responsibility for failure to do their job. They even denied that our wake up call was even ordered.

Some of the staff avoided eye contact and denied to speak English. We, as the tourists and the clients of the Hotel Principal, were told that the problem does not exist.

Mr. Domingo’s small eyes were smiling as he was telling us the hotel’s "no responsibility" policy. He refused to give the name or contact information for his boss, basically telling us to get lost. Instead he kept shrugging his shoulders. Him and the rest of his entourage.

We ended up going to Barcelona Hotel Association where we spoke to their director Mr. Albert Bramona who was kind enough to listen to us. He concluded our meeting by saying that after a similar experience he carries his own alarm and suggests we do that too.

At the end of the ordeal, the hotel finally admitted to forgetting to wake us up. The piece of paper with our wake up order got misplaced. Bad luck, no?

However, they were still somehow not responsible for our lost flights. Instead they offered us a room for the night.

We declined.

For fun of it, we bought a little red alarm clock that woke us up the next day along with the Hotel Rialto’s automatic wake up service.