Review of Hotel Buona Vita Salzburg 3*

My family and I stayed at the Hotel Buona Vita for a few nights a couple of weeks ago — it was the low point of our vacation in and around Germany. This "hotel" was unbelievably horrible and if I could give it zero stars I would. My wife booked the hotels on our trip through a travel agent who went by reviews on a popular hotel booking website. In hindsight, those reviews were obviously fake. Here was our experience: First of all, the location is horrible. Look on Google maps and you can see that it is located in a very run-down, industrial area surrounded by rail yards. There is absolutely nothing nearby except for a mediocre Chinese buffet in front and an Austrian restaurant two doors away that was closed for unknown reasons while we were there. The parking lot was so puny that it would fill up and you would have to park in the seedy looking alley in the back. When we arrived it was early afternoon and there was nobody at the front desk. We waited a half-hour before a woman came from a building next door and apologized while checking us in. After going to the room we found that we did not have enough towels, the bed was a box spring with no mattress or padding whatsoever, and we were almost out of toilet paper. By then we were not able to get in contact with anyone who worked there whatsoever either by phone or in-person at the front desk or at the building next door. It was as if everyone just vanished and put the place on auto pilot! The next morning we saw the same woman at the breakfast room and told her about our problems. She said she would take care of them immediately. When we asked why we could not reach anyone shortly after we checked in, she told us she had to go home too and couldn't stay there all the time (as if she was the only employee). She also said that she spoke with her manager and that they were going to give us a credit on our room. When we got back to our room she had vanished and we still didn't have the towels, toilet paper, or a fixed bed, and our room had been cleaned while we were having breakfast. Luckily there were two guys still working on cleaning rooms so we asked them to take care of the things we needed and I stayed with one of them until it was complete. I don't think he liked it very much, but I wasn't about to let him out of my sight until we had everything we needed. After all was said and done we did not receive any credit whatsoever and we were all too eager to leave this dump. Another negative thing was that the rooms were very hot and humid. We had to leave the window open at night so we got very little sleep because of all the noise from the parking lot and alley below. There was a constant slamming of car doors, shouting, horns honking, and for some reason a small motorcycle that would keep revving his engine and racing back and forth across the parking lot for a couple of hours every night. There was no one to call and complain to. The morning we left was a little rainy and the inside of the hotel smelled horribly like urine. There must have been a leakage problem and wet, moldy wood in the attic. The workers had opened a hatch into the ceiling and left it open and the smell was horrible. We never again saw the original woman who checked us in and no one else knew what we were talking about when we asked about the room credit. We chalked this one up to experience and decided we would just try to spread the word so no one else would make the same mistake we made. If you are going to Salzburg stay somewhere else — ANYWHERE else.