First Palermo Hotel

Pros +

• Fair stay
• The rooms are ok, slightly outdated but the bed was comfortable. The location is ok, lots of restaurants nearby. Unfortunately, we had a very poor experience whilst staying here, with no accountability from the hotel for what occured. During check-in, one of our bags was stolen from the lobby area. On a surface level, the lobby appears secure as you can only enter the hotel when a member of staff unlocks the door for you. However, before we arrived, the reception staff opened the door to a member of the public who was not staying at the hotel. When we arrived to check-in, he was already in the lobby area so we assumed he was another guest as he joined the check-in queue behind us. Our bags were less than 4 feet away from us, but this man managed to steal one of our bags and get out of the lobby before anyone realised. When we asked the reception staff who this man was, they did not seem to know but said he was checking the hotel. There is no working CCTV in the lobby. They have cameras, but the hotel informed us and the police that they do not record, which gave the police nothing to work with other than our statement. We are now nearly 1,000 out of pocket. We also had to miss nearly everything we had planned in Buenos Aires due to the time taken to file the police report and replace the essential stolen items (which included medication and prescription glasses so we had to go to the hospital and find an emergency opticians). This whole experience was extremely upsetting and stressful for us- and was quite frankly made worse by the lack of accountability shown by the hotel. We asked to speak to the manager and hotel owner about what had happened, requesting a small gesture of goodwill as compensation and acknowledgement of what we had suffered on their premises. Unfortunately, this was not forthcoming.