4th Floor Hotel Review - Reykjavik, Iceland

“Don’t do it – Definitely not worth the hassle.”

Review of 4th Floor Hotel by Billy. Also posted on www.tripadvisor.com

We stayed for the 4th Floor Hotel for five nights over the New Year’s 2008/09 holiday. I was originally planning on reviewing this hotel and giving two stars with the comment that it was half a step better than a hostel and that it wasn’t bad enough to leave, or else it would have gotten one stars. But not after the way I was treated at checkout.

The hotel is located at the far end of the shopping/dining district away from the center of town. The best part about the hotel was the OK breakfast, but show up early because they didn’t always replenish things that were eaten.

We are allowed to check in early, only after being argued with about how much our final bill was going to be. We were supposed to be there for six nights but our flight from Atlanta to Boston was delayed enough to missing the connecting flight to Reykjavik. As soon as we arrived back home I emailed 4th Floor and received this response, “Flight delayed noted. We will cancel the first night.” Great. On arrival though there was an disagreement about how to properly recalculate our total, although the amount was only about $6, I had wanted to divide and multiply to get the exact figure but the person working the desk only wanted to quote me a close enough number. I lost this disagreement, and it became the first of a long list of unhelpful, uncaring, aloof, and argumentative and disappointing interactions between both my wife and myself and the staff of the 4th Floor Hotel.
We booked a double room with shared facilities. I’ve done the whole three weeks backpacking in Europe thing and I’ve stayed in hostels with larger and nicer rooms than the 4th Floor hotel. (see my pictures) Looking at the floor plan, our room seems to be one of the larger ones, so I couldn’t have imagined being in a smaller one. There were no sheets on the bed, just a mattress cover and comforter. I thought we were staying in a hotel so we didn’t bring our own sheets. There was almost no storage. We wanted to put stuff on the upper left shelf but it was covered in a thick layer of dust. The two shared restroom facilities were small and never quite felt clean. Luckily my wife remembered to bring shower flip flops, which I hadn’t.

We booked the package that included the car rental. I originally booked the car because I didn’t fully know what to expect in Iceland, what are plans were for tours, and because we were originally planning on being there an extra day. It was also only about an additional $40-50 so I had decided to get the car package just in case. Because our trip was cut a day short, we only ended up using the car once in order to drive up to the Perlan and back. I figured about six Kilometers. Our package included 100km a day, for a total of 500km. But the staff had failed to both write down the mileage on the car from the person who had previously tried to check it and when I checked it out. Usually I snap a picture of the mileage when I get a rental car but this totally slipped my mind this time. At check out the staff tried to say that I had gone over the mileage allowance, and that they were planning to charge my credit card until they could further investigate. It took an extensive argument with the owner/manager to finally convince them we certainly did not go over the mileage allowance.

This final episode put the bitter icing on crummy 4th Floor Hotel cake, ending what was quite a disappointing stay. We had hoped a smaller facility would provide better service, but the only service and hospitality we received from the 4th Floor Hotel was quite poor.