Melia Madrid Princesa

The staff is nice. If you're on the right side and high enough, the view is gorgeous. Breakfast is fantastic. And that's all the good.

Loudest hotel ever. Banging doors, voices, pounding music all night. It's mostly a meetings hotel so the parties and late-night shenanigans are frequent (including house music in the room above me that started pounding at 6:15 a.m.--about a half-hour after the guy next door shut his off for the night). Zero soundproofing and not even carpet to deaden a little of the din. No sleep for you. .

Besides that, this place is tired. Every porcelain thing in the bathroom is chipped. The half shower doors aren't caulked so there's a pond in the bathroom after every shower. The towel rack is about a foot and a half above the bidet so hanging a towel and keeping it clean is an act of physics. Our tub spout handle fell off. And everything is six times more complicated than it needs to be. Eleventy-hundred light switches. The shower is so hard to figure out that there are written directions posted on the wall. Elevators are shaky and sometimes out of order, with very long waits in the morning. WiFi is intermittent at best and slow even when it works. It's all expensive but the experience is cheap.

Pretty sure this hotel gave itself five stars. It's a solid two.