Hostal Talamanca

This accommodation is hit and miss so I aim to write a balanced and honest review to help others planning to book. The location and how central the property is allowed us to have a great time, you also get what you pay for with this accommodation. Obviously the Hostal is not staffed so you are required to do self-check-in. I had completed the check in form prior to arrival (to my knowledge), the form was not user friendly and continued to prompt for further information that I had already provided and glitched a lot. We arrived at the property (only approx 1 hour bus from airport) to find that there was no information in the lobby area to indicate what we do next (this also was not communicated by the property beforehand). At this stage we had no WiFi connection and my mobile data was not working due to being abroad. My phone was also having issues making outbound calls to an abroad number. Thankfully my partner’s phone allowed us to call the property. (Notably, we were only able to enter the property by chance because a previous guest left the door on the latch, if this hasn’t happened we would have been locked out with no passcode and WiFi still). We were given the information to check into the room thankfully over the phone after some panicking. The room itself is clean, basic and exactly what you need. There is a balcony and the facilities seemed fine. Unfortunately the room lacked information, we still did not have the WiFi code and also did not want to keep ringing to ask for information so we left this for a day or so. The AC was temperamental (after reading other reviews this seems to not be an accident). The AC would get turned off periodically during key hours in the day (most of the hours we were in the room the AC was manually turned off). We could hear someone toying with a switch board and would in turn switch the AC on and off. This would make it hard to relax and sleep. When I contacted the help desk they were very nonchalant about this and did not acknowledge that this is something they do intentionally to save money. When I referenced it was turned back on they said “good to know”… no apology or info about when AC is available for use. The walls are very thin, frankly if you want to sleep you need ear plugs and even then it does not 100% block out the noise. Not even the street noise but people talking in the neighbouring rooms, the walls are extremely thin. Lack of staff also means rowdy groups in the corridor. A couple of nights in we were woken up by shouting and banging. I had to get up at 5am to check out what was happening to then find the whole property was flooded including parts of our room. There were a group standing in the corridor chatting for ages in the early hours which really wasn’t ideal. The property did not acknowledge the flood at all, we still did not even get our room cleaned this whole time nor did we receive new towels until we asked a housekeeper (we only saw a housekeeper once who was