Saana R.
Yelp
We went on a university trip through Holland, Belgium and Western Germany a couple of weeks back, and out of all the places we stayed, B&B Utrecht was by far the worst.
The service was horrible - the guys at the front desk didn't seem to have any idea of how to run a business. They weren't prepared for us at all, and I had to calculate the price of our stay for them. Also, they offered bed-linens for rent for 1,5e/ person, after which the other employee told the one helping us that he wasn't about to do the washing for that amount, so they raised it to 2,5 e/ person. After this they stopped paying attention to us, and started idly chatting with eachother. After around 15 minutes I asked if I could pay for the stay, and found out that they had just been waiting for us to say so.
The rooms were a major let down. We opted for the dormitories. The beds there were incredibly flimsy - people in the bottom bunks complained that every time someone in the top bunk moved, they would wake up to the noise. The plastic bedcovers were dirty, and the ambiance was horrible - the room was stuffed with extra beds so it was hard to move around, and the wallpapers were torn and coming off of the walls. This is not criminal in such a cheap hostel, but the window was also broken, and the weather was exceptionally cold. When we finally got our bed linens after the staff had washed them, they were wet and mine smelled like vomit.
The showers were in the hallway, and only one out of three had any warm water. There were no locks on the shower or bathroom doors - we made a paper sign on the door to indicate wether the bathroom was vacant or not. The staff did supply free towels for us, which was nice.
The only reason this place deserves two stars instead of one is the free food. There are quite decent if somewhat shady frozen meat products freely available - chicken cutlets, sausages and the like. We made a nice dinner of pasta, different meats, and nutella crepes fully from products the hostel supplied, and no-one complained about a sore stomach afterward - luckily we noticed the eggs that were rotten before mixing them with the batter.
Breakfast was made from the same supplies by a staff member, and it had a good variety especially of sweet rolls and cakes.
Overall, the place had the feel that a couple of laid-back friends who have travelled a lot thought that hey, running a hostel can't be that hard - but without any experience, there are a lot of things that are easy to miss, giving the whole enterprise a very unprofessional air. I wish the guys all the best, but they really need to get their s*** together if they want to keep the place from going under.