A weekend away in Rome, sounds nice doesn't it, well at least thats what I thought when I booked 4 nights at the Hotel Mari, how wrong I was! On arrival no one greeted us! We were left to find a hotel reception in a buliding with god knows how many staircases! With no lifts, we had to carry a suitcase up four floors when we eventually found the hotel reception, we were greeted by a rude smoking italian man who didn't speak a word of english! We were given a key to our room and were sent on our way. On the way up the next three floors, we walked past building blocks, cement bags and sand. I was praying they weren't doing works on our floor. Got to our floor and it looked like a bomb had hit it! There were wires hanging out of the wall, holes through walls, it was just awful! I thought to myself why was I not informed of this, I was so angry. Like clock work the next two mornings we were woken up at 7am by loud banging, people talking outside our room, drilling, mobile phones going off, it was a nightmare! It made us both tired and miserable for the whole day! So on the third morning I had had enough, I went down to the hotel reception and I was treated appalingly! No one spoke english and they refused to talk to me because I didn't speak italian! I eventually got the hotel manager on the phone and the best she could offer me was two breakfasts for the next morning which costed five euros each! I kept asking her why I wasn't told about the buliding works and she kept saying there was a leak , a floor had fallen through, but my boyfriend works in construction so we both knew damn well there was no leak and it had been planned for months! We then went away and came back later on in the evening. All I wanted was an apology and no one would give me one. We then spoke to the hotel manager again that night and she then started to threaten us and asked for both our names! She told us she hoped we'd had a f**king crap holiday! By this point I'd had enough and didn't want to be there anymore. She had made us feel very unsafe, so I asked for a refund for that night so we could go somewhere else and they refused! So we just left.
We went to a hotel about 10 minutes walk up the road called Hotel Ascot, it was really nice, clean and quiet place an excellent hotel and I would thoroughly recommend staying there extremeley helpful English speaking staff, I wish I had stayed there for the whole of our visit to the wonderful City of Rome.