OK, so in this world you get what you pay for. You can’t have champagne tastes on light ale budgets as we say in the UK, but why do hostels have to be so rude and passive aggressive, particularly with their signage?
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Pub Street Hostel
This place offered dorm beds, but also private rooms and according to trip.com were offering rooms for $9 a night, it seemed to be the deal of the century, until we arrived.
On said arrival who I can only assume was the manager berated me for booking with Trip saying “This company always gets our prices wrong. We never get this problem with Agoda” – with the every clear implication being it was my fault they had an issue with a booking agent.
I asked if he could give us our keys and finish the booking process later, to which he replied an unequivocal “NO”.
We were then taken to our rooms, both of which were by all accounts the most hidden away and probably worst rooms of the hotel, my colleagues bed having not been made after being slept in. And you guessed it they did not clean it after the first night.
Passive Aggressive Hostel signs
What though most equally amused and bemused me was something far from unique to Pub Street Hostel, but is more a common theme of hostels in general and that was the passive aggressive signage going on.
There was one main sign, which had the usual no guns, drugs, outside food and dogs etc, but the two that really ground my gears were about shoes and AC.
Despite not being clean, like at all, shoes were required to be removed before entering or leaving the property. Something inexplicable, but also harshly enforced by the staff. Rules are rules after all.
To read about Street Food in Siem Reap click here.
There was also the obligatory blackboard at the front, which offered tours and of course more rules, often followed by NO EXCEPTIONS. One such rules was that between 12-2 pm there was to be no AC. For the environment? Fir kicks? To save money? Or was it just to have a rule. I’m personally opting for the later.
Quite ironically they didn’t even have a remote for the AC unit, so I could not even acquiesce to their request.
So general rule of thumb don’t book Pub Street Hostel by trip.com, or perhaps at all, unless you have a kink for rules and their enforcement.