Stesicoro Exclusive House

Avoid it if possible. We arrived about one hour earlier than the checkin time and no one was at the reception. After ringing a bell, a lady from the cleaning staff basically yelled at us, in Italian only, apparently because we showed up too early. Of course we knew that but we thought that at least we could leave the luggage for a while till we can check in. That is actually not possible… Instead the staff basically slammed the door in front of us leaving a family of three with a lot of luggage on the street to figure it out ourselves. I have never experienced such level of rudeness and total lack of empathy from any hotel staff. Few days earlier there was another misunderstanding with them, regarding transportation from the airport, which they finally declined. This may have been a genuine miss-communication but they showed not very little effort whatsoever to help. The reception was not very friendly either, we even got the sense that they were not happy to pay the city tax by card… The elevator starts from the first floor, which makes it quite uncomfortable if you have a lot of luggage. Btw, the guy at the reception did not even try to help us bring our luggage to the elevator. After check in, we realized that they had forgotten to provide toilet paper in the bathrooms! Could not however resolve the problem immediately because the reception was absent for some time… they eventually responded to our request for toilet paper through whatsup. The apartment (one of the deluxe ones) was not so bad, although several things were annoying, for example a door that was squeaking, very basic and old kitchen equipment (very old microwave oven, no coffee machine), some small damages on the furnitures here and there… the balconies were not in a great condition, not exactly inviting you to seat outside, the beds were not great either. One more thing to note is that it is opposite a bar, which makes it quite loud at night, so if you are easily annoyed by loud music, this might be an issue. We could also hear loud noises from the neighboring apartment. The location is quite central, so this is probably the best feature. Overall, disappointing experience and would not recommend.

It is a building of apartments in Catania. The first thing is that you can hear everything from the apartment next door, every single word. The isolation is terrible and we couldn't sleep. But the worst of all is Gino, this employee does not help to fix anything and is rude. Thank God that was the only bad experience in Italy in our entire trip.