mk | hotel münchen city in Munchen

This hotel left a lot to be desired.

Location: It was in a fairly good location for walking (walking distance from train station and beautiful old town Munich, as well as markets and gardens) but the street it is on is a bit rough. I never felt unsafe, but I didn't want to hang out there at all.

Room: Room was extremely small, the bed was uncomfortable, and there were two very flat pillows. On top of that, the room looked into a little interior courtyard that had all the garbages from the hotel in it, so when the staff would put out the trash it smelled extremely bad.

Amenities: There aren't really any. On top of that, when we stayed there, our room's TV AND Wi-Fi were both not working. I mentioned the TV issue to the worker at the front desk and she explained the maintenance person was not there that day but gave us a free hotel breakfast as an apology. Unfortunately, later that night when we tried to watch some Netflix on our computer before bed we discovered that the Wi-Fi was also not working. We were going to mention this on check out, but there was no one at the desk when we left in the morning and we just dropped our cards into a little box.

Overall the property feels more like a poorly run AirBNB - not a hotel experience at all.

Will definitely not be returning and felt this was extremely bad value for the price we paid (€120).

I wish this hotel was good. The rooms are nice! The setup is nice! But their processes are broken. Here is an email I sent to the hotel management, with the problems I had. For bonus points, I wanted to include below the unsatisfactory answer I got from them, but google maps reviewed have a length limit! (tsk tsk) They really should fix up their processes for this to be a good hotel.

My email:

I'm just staying in MK hotel in Munich City, and saw a few broken processes, and thought I'd reach out. (The front desk staff were not particularly empowered to care.) I should say the hotel is really nice. But here are the broken things:

1. Any person can get a key to my room, if they have my last name and birth date. This is because the key card machine, which sits in the street in front of the hotel, asks only for my name and date of birth, and then it issues a key. Note that this is true even after I'm checked in.

So if I want to break into someone's room, I can just look up their date of birth, and then I can just get into their room, while all their stuff is in there. (Anyone who knows my birthday and how old I am, knows my date of birth -- this info is pretty much available online.) This is super dangerous. I recommend the blogpost "The Security Mindset" by Schneier on Security, to systematically avoid this kind of bad situation. But you don't really need a fancy blog post to know this is broken.

2. Room cleaning: the hotel signage creates the expectation that rooms will be cleaned only upon request (great! good for the environment.) But in practice, my room was cleaned multiple times, by surprise, even when I had the "do not disturb" sign. (I have put the do not disturb sign because I wanted to make sure my room was not cleaned, since all my stuff was lying around, and I had valuables in the room; the safe was not working). The cleaner even creepily folded up my dirty underwear that were on the floor, and placed them passive-aggressively on the bed. She was probably good, actually, but if my room is going to be entered into, I'd love to actually know. Especially if I put the do not disturb sign on the outside of the door. I felt this was a big violation of privacy, and given the situation with the safe (which was faulty), it also felt like a danger to my possessions. Overall, it would help to be much more clear about whether rooms are going to be entered into.

(Note that there is a sign on the desk that said rooms are cleaned typically every two days. However, that sign is double-sided, and when I entered the room, the German side of the sign was pointing in my direction, and I had no idea the other side has English. I wasn't in the mood to auto-translate every sign I see, so I ignored it. Big mistake! I don't think any money or posessions were taken, but my wallet with hundreds of euros was left in the room (since I did not imagine anyone would enter if I left the "do not disturb sign", and money or valuables *could* have been taken. It feels very unsafe.)

3. Pet peeves: (i) communication from the hotel was mostly in German. I don't know why. I booked through booking.com, and comms with them was of course in English, but as soon as I started getting emails from the hotel, it was all in German. (ii) the safe wasn't working. In fact, I think a previous guest left it locked. But also the instructions on it were quite cryptic, so I don't know, maybe I didn't operate it correctly. I didn't bother asking for help because I was always in a hurry, and the staff are not super-helpful, and I expected no one to actually enter my room, because the elevator sign said that rooms would be cleaned by request, and because I left the do not disturb sign on.

I think that's it. Overall, the hotel itself was actually really nice. But the whole experience that I describe above felt canny and unsafe. You seem like you take hospitality very seriously, so I thought I'd drop you a line.

Really disappointing stay. The late night check in was not convenient as it required extensive information and wasn’t even clear that you had to use a machine. Then eventually the night manager came out I assume that’s who he was - and he was incredibly rude and treated us like ******* children. No respect at all. The amenities in the room were weak, soap only, no personal hygiene kit, one coffee serving for two people across four nights and to make it worse it was only paper cups. They cleaned the room once and replaced towels only - the bathroom was not even satisfactory. Very poor and the worst hotel so far on my European summer travels. I’ve stayed in a similar area before and I know the quality that can be offered nearby.