Trent A.
Yelp
Stayed here for ten days in May. Got mugged and lost my phone + wallet, so I had to use their phone to make several calls back to the USA. Wasn't easy, but eventually, I made it back home.
2 months later, I get an email from the hostel. Attached was a low-res screenshot of some charges and an invoice for ~$100 USD. They claimed I owed them payment for the international calls I made at the hostel.
Additionally, they made a couple of claims to justify my debt: (1) I had no social media, and (2) they "did try to communicate our awareness of the cost" (their exact words).
(1) is not true. I had social media, but how am I supposed to access it without either my phone (for 2FA login purposes) or my email (requires my phone to login)? So that is a moot point.
(2) is also not true. Every time I asked to use the phone, for anything, the person working said of course, and handed me the phone. No one in the hostel ever mentioned anything to me at all, in my ten days there, about the cost. Paying for phone usage was nowhere on their website or in their terms, and I never saw something like that enforced or even talked about. So that is also a strange thing to lie about.
To top it all off, they found my dad's boss online, and then contacted him to try to get me to pay? Very unprofessional behavior.
*Despite all of this*, and despite no real way to enforce a flimsy charge like this, I paid the invoice. In exchange, I would strongly encourage anyone reading this to *stay literally anywhere else in Rio*. The hostel really isn't good enough to make up for such poor management.
At first, I thought it was strange that Brazilians would act so miserly. And I have nothing personally against the non-working Brazilians I met, who were all very nice. But when you find out the hostel is, in actuality, owned and founded by a certain (((other))) group of people, this management makes way, way more sense.