Hotel Marinela Sofia

A sub-decent hotel, that apparently used to be great. Beautiful lobby.
Clear room, nice bed.
Uncooked sausage, cold scrambled eggs and questionable fruktsallad for breakfast.
Non working phone at the room, room safe that went into deadlook -however not fastande and easy to carry to reception. (My Guardian Angel made med attempt to open it the nite before a very early drparture). Questiknable room cleaning -not wiped bathroom beachvolleyboll, not cleaned glases AND cleaning crew sittning in a linnen storage from whing massive amounts of cigarrette smoke entered the hallway.

The Italian restaurant downstairs claimed 8 shrimps to be 200 grams, more likely 100 grams (which add up to a light weight watchers dinner......)

Use it if you are doing business close by and are used to camping.

There is no free parking for the guests of the hotel, because the hotel parking “is managed by another company” and I had to pay 20€ on top of that the room cost for 24 hours of parked time. Strike 1! Btw, all parking spot in the vicinity of the hotel, outside of the hotel parking area, are actually limited time municipal spots (a green zone, which means you can pay for up to 2 hours to park there, after which if you don’t move your car, you will get fined).
The quality of the food from the room service is beyond terrible - a simple chicken burger for dinner had my stomach upset up to noon on the following day. The bread was hard and crumbly and the ingredients were dripping in low quality frying oil. Strike 2!
The room interior (I had standard room - lowest tier) is what you would find in a 3 star hotel for half the price minus the private AC. I was surprised that a 5 star hotel would not provide a private AC in every room. So, I was cold in the morning and there was no way to change the room temperature. There was also audible music even past 12 am, so good luck sleeping. And that was Strike 3!

Tl;dr: I would not recommend the hotel to anybody and my experience was not 5 stars.

Such a prestigious hotel, such poor and disrespectful attitude towards the CUSTOMER.
I wanted to check out right after breakfast and then go to the room to pick up my luggage. The front desk person said “No, I can check you out, only when you have the luggage with you. How do I know that you will not stay in the room after you have checked out”. I was really shocked. This is the first time someone tells me that.

I turn to him and said that “you show no respect to the customer. You imply that I am not a descent person and that I would have stayed in the room without paying”? !!!! Of course I left without saying a word.

And the “comedy” goes on. 5 minutes later, in the check out, they asked me if I had something from the mini bar and I answered that I didn’t. What did they do? They called the cleaning lady to check!!!!! And to confirm that I was not stealing!
COME ON GUYS. This is not an attitude of a professional, working in such a brand. And of course it is not the employee’s mistake. MANAGEMENT has its share as well for failing to properly select and train people or having the right procedures under which they should operate.

1 member of staff was nice, rooms were clean and hotel was unique. Japanese restaurant was great. Room service and reception service were poor. All staff seemed miserable to work there. No air con, when you called reception, no one answered. When you went to reception to ask for support on anything, the response was sorry we cannot help or no. This was meant to be 5 star, it might be in 5 star surroundings, but the service would have been 0 stars. Given 2 because the hotel was unuasl.

Hotel of Thieves! Very unpleasant environment in terms of safety. Left the jacket in the bathroom next to the reception and when I returned to take it, it was already stolen. 4 star hotel can’t guarantee safety of personal belongings. So strange. Never recommend this hotel to anyone! And of course, the breakfast is terrible, better not to eat at all.

I am female and was staying alone here. The hotel GAVE A KEY TO MY ROOM to some stranger at night and he freely entered my room at 1:30 at night. Shock.

Avoid this hotel if you need privacy, because the reception easily gives the key from the room where you stay to random people who can enter the room in the middle of the night.

When I complained to the manager, he didn’t show any sign of surprise or that he is impressed with this information, and then with a bored face he told that something similar happened last night to their other guests and they have called a police.

So looks like they have complete mess happening there.

Receptionist was awfully smelling with sweat. You need to hang on for 20 min to get somebody from the reception to pick up the phone.
Dirty plates and poor choice at the breakfast as the cherry on top, all those proving that it were not the occasional fails but systematically awful service about which nobody cares.

Also, I paid 380 eur per 2 nights and they didn’t even try to clean my room on the second day.

After several visits to the manager he promised to send some compensation to my account as compensation for the incident but I saw that he is obviously lying to get rid of me.

2 weeks after it is obvious and no money on my account.

Owners of the hotel have been in prison.

But I think more employees shall go to prison because it should be illegal to give access to the guests rooms to random strangers.

Very disappointed. Not to the standard of a 5 star hotel. Loud music. Extremely loud. Service was bad. I asked for refund, they never got back to me.