Guest User
July 16, 2023
When I booked online for Hotel Finisterra in Buenos Aires, the website stated it had “one room left.” It didn’t say where this room was located, but I discovered it was on the second floor, directly over-looking the street. After five nights at Hotel Finisterra, I cannot state emphatically enough that - unless you are completely immune to excessively loud street noise - do not book any rooms at this hotel that face the street. Otherwise, you will be kept up until 4am every morning. Specifically, there is an Italian restaurant next door to the hotel that begins blasting dance music around 10am (I guess that’s when the kitchen starts prepping) and you’ll hear it very clearly. By mid-afternoon there’ll be a slight reprieve – just lots of shouting and laughter and truck deliveries – until around 8pm, when the real orchestral cacophony begins. This restaurant plays both recorded and live music – all of which throbs directly into your hotel bed – until 12:30am or so, when it switches to drunken shouting, cars honking, more delivery trucks parked outside your window with their engines idling, shouting again, furniture getting moved across the floor (this will really shake your bed), continued car doors slamming, then finally the kitchen staff leaving, many of whom are - as I was to hear/learn – frequently drunk themselves, and like standing outside shouting, smoking, and laughing with one-another until close to 4am. After the first night of this experience, I came down to the hotel’s dining lounge feeling very tired, but was greeted by an extremely friendly kitchen/cleaning staff who prepared a truly impressive breakfast selection: fruits, cereals, bruschetta, pastries, breads, eggs, juices, and very decent coffee. As much as I wanted to ground myself from the previous night’s noise and simply enjoy my breakfast experience, it proved challenging to do so, for the hotel plays music to “enhance” your dining enjoyment; not an uncommon practice - but what they play and how loudly they play it – is not common. To be specific again, the music was obtrusively loud, and on this first morning I was greeted with Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun, followed by Van Halen’s Jump, then some sort of British techno-pop thing lots of heavy, computerized drumbeats, to David Lee Roth “singing” California Girls. And yes – I do remember the exact order of songs – because it was so obtrusive and genuinely awful in its selection that it’s been burned into my memory and I can’t unhear it. But after having to endure David Lee Roth, I’d finally had enough and asked the gentleman from the front desk (he had come into the lounge area) if he wouldn’t mind turning down the music. The first time I asked, he looked annoyed and replied loudly with “Huh?” to which I repeated I’d like to have the music turned down, to which he then asked, “Huh? You want the music turned off?” – and so I simply nodded “yes.” This caused another annoyed look, but he did indeed turn off