Atlante Star Hotel

CAVEAT EMPTOR!
I have not had a worse experience at a hotel in my entire 57 year life, and I have stayed at quite a few hotels. I blame myself, in part, because I did not do more research before booking a reservation with the Hotel Atlante Star. The long list of reviews from other dissatisfied guests is there to be seen on websites such as this one. Unfortunately, I relied on positive and glowing reviews of widely sold travel guides (i.e., Frommers’, Fodor’s, and Michelin) to make my selection of a hotel in Rome. How can these widely sold travel guides be so wrong about the poor quality of the facilities and services of the Hotel Atlante Star in the face of obvious, contradictory evidence and the significant abundance of complaints from previous guests that are posted on websites?
Do NOT expect the Hotel Atlante Star to match the quality of other four star hotels. This hotel should NOT be placed in the four star or even 3 ½ star categories. At best, it belongs in the three star category.
Too late, I learned the hard way about this hotel’s common practice, well-documented by guests’ reviews on websites, of over-booking its hotel rooms. Its “bait-and-switch” policy lures a travel-weary guest to a supposed four star hotel and then offers the guest a stay at its “apartment,” an overpriced dump about a block away from the hotel. This hotel policy enables them to charge for rooms in a low quality facility that would go vacant if it were not for this cynical trick on guests that had confirmed reservations for the Hotel Atlante Star, as we did. We attempted to find other higher quality accommodations but were unable to do so because they also were completely booked; we had not much alternative but to accept the Hotel Alante Star’s offer for the first overnight stay at the “apartment,” the room was about what you would expect for a one star hotel, but at about twice the price.
The hotel staff, the desk clerk/ concierges in particular, made mistake after mistake after mistake, and all of the mistakes were in the hotel’s favour and /or adverse to the guests. I concluded that the hotel’s staff could not be that incompetent, that most of these “mistakes” were not honest ones, and that the management of the Hotel Atlante Star and its desk clerks/ concierges are skilful and well-practiced at deceiving and fleecing their guests toward an objective of profit-taking by any means.

The hotel’s shabby treatment of its guests extends beyond the over-booking of hotel rooms to overcharging for hotel rooms - charging more than the rates clearly specified on written, confirmed reservations for the hotel. Our confirmed reservations clearly specified that our hotel rooms would cost 175 Euro’s /night for the evenings of 9/26 through 9/28. Yet the hotel presented us with an advance bill, at my request, for 180 Euro’s per night. It took me three different discussions on 9/27 and 9/28, totalling more than 1 ½ hours, to correct the overcharging for the rooms. I asked twice to speak to the hotel’s manager for assistance on the evening of 9/27 and the morning of 9/28, but he was not available. Given the extraordinary difficulty I had correcting simple and obvious overcharging errors, I cannot believe these “mistakes” were honest ones. I wasn’t surprised to witness, on the evening of 9/27, the same type of difficulty experienced by a TV crew from a well-known international news organization.
Concerning its over-rated and over-priced restaurant, only about half of the restaurant has a view of St. Peter’s Basilica. The attitudes of several of the waiters were condescending. The table linens for the buffet breakfasts were unchanged and soiled from the previous evenings’ dinners. The food offerings at the buffet breakfast were the most Spartan, least generous that we have experienced at any of the dozens of four star hotels we have stayed at in Italy and elsewhere in Europe.
The information about the Hotel Atlante Star, provided on numerous travel and hotel websites, is very misleading. The rooms we received looked nothing like the one shown on the websites. Our room was small and cramped and had a view of a dreary alley with lots of laundry hanging on lines. The websites’ information about the hotel’s amenities offered a “complimentary airport shuttle” but does not indicate that a free trip from the hotel back to the airport is not included. The websites present a picture of a nice table setting at the outdoor, rooftop area of the hotel, but the hotel did not serve food there during our four day visit. In addition to being small and cramped, the bedrooms are noisy with very little sound proofing. From our rooms, no. 501 and no. 511, we could hear a couple arguing at 3 AM.. Also, these two bedrooms were located beneath the restaurant and kitchen floor; late at night and early in the morning, everyday, items were frequently dragged or rolled across the upstairs floors, creating sounds that sounded, at first to me, like thunderstorms (my wife had to use earplugs). When one books and pays for a bedroom for three people, you should know beforehand that the bed for the third person is a cot: there is not enough room in the bedroom for a third bed. We didn’t know that.
Other miscellaneous issues included an inadequate supply of hot water for shower purposes. The hotel would not cash a VISA traveller’s check for 100 Euro’s, this was the first time I have been unable to cash a traveller’s check at (what is supposed to be) a four star hotel. We were unable to obtain a fully itemized easily understandable receipt for the hotel bill; the desk clerk could only provide us with a list of adjustments and corrections to the missing original bill, which is meaningless without knowing what the original, erroneous bill looked like.
There is indeed, unfortunately, much more that I could document about the poor services and facilities of this hotel, but hopefully, this was more than enough information to help you avoid making the same mistake of staying at the Hotel Atlante Star.
To the management of the Hotel Atlante Star - the travel public is catching on to you.