After leaving booking a hostel in Melbourne a bit late we were a little short of choices, however from my Lonely Planet guide this hostel sounded good and we were pretty keen to be in St Kilda. We were coming to Melbourne to look for jobs and settle in to a new life but we couldn’t have chosen a worse hostel to start in. This was a place where people stayed while working in Melbourne so we thought we were being a bit spoilt after our other hostels but among the staff, the place and the other guests we wouldn’t have stayed the whole week if it wasn’t for losing money or not having any where to go.
What went wrong?
When we first walked in to our dorm room we found it didn’t smell nice and nor was it very clean. I found countless pieces of rubbish under my bed and someone’s towel! It was the evening when we arrived so not as if the place hadn’t been cleaned for the day. The guy who checked us in was friendly enough but forgot to tell us any information. We missed free pancake breakfast every day except once because no one told us about it. I went to put my food in the fridge only to be told carrier bags were not allowed and I would have to purchase one of their bags – another thing we were not informed about but my boyfriend managed to get one for free by trying to pay with a $50 bill!
When you wanted to cook all pots, pans, plates etc were kept behind reception and you had to hand over your room key when taking cooking things. Which was all okay except for when they got cross with me because I needed to go to my room and hadn’t handed back my cooking things. Or when we did hand back our cooking things only for reception to have LOST OUR KEY!!! Apparently they handed it out because someone else in our room had lost it, but they didn’t know who and really couldn’t be bothered to sort it out that night. We did eventually get another key the next day but in my mind losing our key was not okay.
The showers were a full on task in themselves: within the time it took me to have a shower it would have burnt me, frozen me and basically stopped because the pressure dropped! The worst came on the Friday night when we wanted to go to bed by 11 to be fresh for job hunting but everyone else seemed to be partying. Our dorm room was on the bottom floor opposite the common area which housed the kitchen, bar and seating area all in one. There seemed to be no quiet time, the music just played and played, we had drunken people not even staying in our room come and harass us and when I cleaned my teeth ready for bed I had a drunk guy shout at me for going to bed and told me I had to come out – yes that’s right we had to share the same bathroom as the people who were drinking in the bar. Although if I’m honest it wasn’t just Friday night with the noise every night something was going on outside our door including boys playing football at 1 am.
The list could go on and on but I think you have got my point now. The only real thing the place had going for it was that you could steal Peter Pans’ wifi from the lobby area. The price was pretty good at $154 per a week for the largest dorm and the location isn’t bad as you are right by three different trams. Had we of been staying one or two nights I wouldn’t have formed such strong opinions but after a week it really gets old. However if you were coming here to party you would probably really enjoy this hostel but when we were looking for jobs and trying to save money this was pretty much my worst nightmare.
