HCC Montblanc

I’m not sure why this place doesn’t have better reviews.
It’s the second time I stayed here in a year. I was there for work the first time, staying a total of 9 days. The hotel is conveniently located, clean and has very comfortable beds. The layout is a bit odd but it’s still not bad.
On my second visit I brought many friends and the staff remembered me from previously. My friends also thought it was pretty good. It’s not the W Hotel, but it’s a lot better located being only a few minutes walk from Las Ramblas and the Gothic Quarter.
I will happily stay at this hotel again.

We booked this hotel as part of a cruise package, so we didn’t have a lot of control over choices. However, I’ve booked packages before, so I wasn’t expecting five stars.
I was actually pleasantly surprised.
The staff is used to English-​speakers (but with cruise ships dumping buses of tourists, this should not be surprising.)
One life lesson I learned from business travel — learn how to say «Good morning, Good evening, Please, Thank you, and Do you speak English?» in the local language before you leave home. (In France, know how to apologize for not speaking French.) Just trying their language will buy you a lot of points, especially if you’re surrounded by «ugly Americans». We were. Sometimes, just saying «Buenos Dias. Como estas?» will pay dividends. I think it happened for us.
Here’s what bumped my rating up — we had a rather complex situation, in that we had been in a two-​bedroom suite on the ship — my wife, my Mom, and myself. So, by some strange logic, the cruise line booked us a triple room. Now, I love my Mom and she and my wife have a very good relationship, but in the suite, we had our own rooms, and now we were just going to have our own beds. So, I went on their website and booked my Mom her own room.
So, when we checked in, we had one triple room from the cruise line, and a single room from my booking. The rooms ended up on completely different sides of the hotel. I really wanted the rooms in close proximity, since Mom doesn’t really like being on her own in a strange place.
I was told that wasn’t possible. I tried. I failed. So it goes.
So, Mom went off to one tower and we went off to the other. As we started to unload suitcases, we asked the porter to remove the extra bed (it was a triple, remember?) As he got the bed out of the room, the phone rang. The front desk had found a room three doors down from Mom, at the end of the hall. As we hadn’t unpacked, we just had the porter put the luggage back on the cart and moved to our new room.
Major kudos to our porter for his willingness to just reload everything he had just unloaded and move us to the other side of the hotel. No complaints. Impressive.
To me, this was above and beyond. Meeting special requests for someone on a bulk rate package is not something I would expect. This is worth a star or more on its own.
Our room was a decent size, especially for Europe, clean, with a nice view of the patio. As some others have mentioned, the hair dryer is a European standard, which is not good (according to my wife.) It is pretty bad, but they’re everywhere.
Mom’s room was small, but comfortable — it was a true single room.
The hotel has a restaurant which hosts a large breakfast buffet, which was included with our room. My breakfast is usually just coffee, which was excellent. Mom and my wife both enjoyed the variety of options. At dinner, there is a very limited menu — I think it is whatever the chef finds in the market that day, and nothing enticed us, so we skipped it.
There is a bar which is small, but next to a large sitting room with lots of natural light. We would sit there in the afternoon, have a drink and read or plan the next day’s activity. The staff was amazing. The furniture could use an update, but it was passable.
The floors are not carpeted, which is good from a cleanliness standpoint, but it also means there isn’t much sound muffling. Noise in the hallway is easily heard in the rooms.
My wife mentioned if there are more than four people in the elevator, they better be related. I would just say if you have two Americans, you’d better have two older Europeans, and then you may all fit. Snugly.
Do not expect a lot of available electrical outlets. The front desk found us an extension cord, but I was glad we packed converters and a power strip. I use a C-​PAP, so I need an outlet close to the bed and without the extension cord, I would have been sleeping with my feet near the headboard. (This has happened before in Europe.)
WiFi was fine — I had a phone, laptop and iPad and my wife had her iPad and phone. Of course, all those devices need charging, so the scarcity of outlets arose again. (Pack a power strip and a universal converter. Trust me.) We used the WiFi to find a place to eat after we didn’t want the restaurant’s options.
Some of these may sound like complaints, but I’ve stayed in hotels all over Europe, and I’ve paid more to have the same issues. So, more an observation than a complaint.
The hotel is within walking distance of Las Ramblas. Before you get there, you will see a plaza where all the tour buses congregate. There are banks with ATMs in the area, as well. A reasonable amount of restaurants are close by, including a couple within the same block. (If you’re American and afraid of local cuisine, I saw a Burger King, and the Hard Rock is around the corner.)
For what we paid, I think it was a good deal, especially with the breakfast included. It’s a nice hotel in a good location.

This hotel just didn’t do it for me. The lobby is highly misleading, which disappoints me. The rooms seem to have been last updated in the early 90s, which is just gross.
Rooms were fairly tiny, the hair dryers were at least 20 years old (and mine didn’t work) and the bed was covered in one of those icky, old duster covers (not really a comforter). The TV was ancient and the remote was iffy. The carpet also looked like it hadn’t been changed since 1975. It was old, super dark and just generally dingy.
The bathroom was OK (aside from that weirdo hair dryer), but the showers LEAKED like crazy if you didn’t have the curtain tucked tightly in the tub. Yuck. Oh, and the wifi that was advertised on their website was «not working» the entire two days we stayed in the hotel. They claimed it was «down temporarily» but that seemed pretty scam-​y to me.
I’ve definitely stayed in crappier hotels, but this wasn’t a great place to stay, especially if you can avoid it. The only redeeming qualities are: proximity to transportation and La Rambla; and proximity to a Starbucks with wifi that works all the time. Stay somewhere else if you can.

On one of my trips to Barcelona, I neglected to research hotels in advance. So there I was, the night before my trip, and still no lodging. This hotel turned up on Tripadvisor with good reviews and a reasonable price.
My first impression was a positive one, as the location is fantastic, the hotel lobby was clean and modern, and the staff was very helpful. However, my room was terrible. It was the size of a closet, was not clean, and was very musty smelling. The bed was small and the mattress hard. It was difficult to walk around the room with luggage in the room! The bathroom was fairly nice though — clean and spacious. The air conditioner did not work well and turned off completely whenever you were not in the room (required the room card to operate). The hotel staff had warned me not to leave the room’s one window open as there could be theft. This meant coming back to a hot and stuffy room each evening.

Mitigé
Cet hotel contemporain aux lignes sobres et épurées se situe en plein dans la «cita vella», la vieille ville de Barcelone, à quelques metres de la cathédrale et du quartier gothique, et à deux pas de la rambla ! Il jouit d’un emplacement vraiment idéal et est un des rares hôtels à avoir un parking en sous sol. L’accueil est vraiment bien, le service tres professionnel et l’ambiance feutrée, digne d’un hotel de son rang. Les chambres sont simples mais on n’en demande pas plus. Un petit bémole qui vient de la situation même de cet hotel. En effet, la Via Laietana est une artère tres empruntée de jour… comme de nuit… et je conseille de demander des chambres donnant de l’autre côté de la voie sinon le sommeil et vraiment difficile !