Stay away from Hotel Discovery Inn in Kathmandu, Nepal

Because of some unexpected complications with my flight out of Nepal, I had to stay one more day in Kathmandu. As there was no point in spending too much money on another night at Hotel Horizon, where I had stayed for the last week, I chose a cheaper option, Hotel Discovery Inn. But let me tell you something, the few bucks that I saved were not worth the troubles I encountered at this poorly managed and awfully maintained hotel.

Although travel review sites, such as Trip Advisor, give Hotel Discovery Inn many stars, the reality on the real site is quite different. That tells you a lot how accurate these websites are. Lonely Planet’s Nepal guide has no mention of this budget hotel and there’s no official website.

Hotel Discovery Inn was recommended to me by a random Nepalese guy who worked for a travel agency in Thamel. I’d met him quite a few times on Thamel Street and had even booked from him a two-day trip to Nagkarot–which turned out to be very good. So when he told me that he knew of a good budget hotel, I let him take me to it. Actually, all I wanted was a room with air-conditioning, cable TV and clean bathroom. I don’t think that was too much to ask.

Hotel Discovery Inn is located in the Thamel area and is accessible down a poorly lit, garbage strewn side alley. The building looks like a block of flats build in the Projects and has a small crowded lobby. The receptionist made sure I paid before they showed me the room and, trusting the Nepalese guy who brought me there, I had no objections. After that, the nightmare started…

5 reasons why you should not stay at this hotel:

• The air-conditioner did not work. Luckily, I turned on the AC while the receptionist was still with me in the room. When he saw the obvious, he didn’t say anything, just walked out and opened the room across the corridor. “Try this one,” he said. I turned on the AC. It started humming noisily.

• Immediately after, I went into the bathroom and turned on the tap and shower. To my surprise, not even a single trickle of water came out. I told the receptionist to show me how “it works,” maybe I was not experienced enough to be able to turn on the taps in a bathroom… He tried to no avail. “I have to turn the water on,” he said. “We’ve been cleaning the pipes.” Five minutes later he retuned with a big smile on his face, turned the taps and… bingo… water started gushing out. Brown water! He looked at me with pride and said, “Done!” “Not really,” I told him. About fifteen minutes later the water became clearer, but it was nowhere close to being clean. That night, I brushed my teeth with bottled water.

• We went out to eat something and when we returned we wanted to watch some TV. Websites claim that rooms “come equipped with cable TV” so we thought of catching up with what was going on around the world but, surprise-surprise, the cable connection or the TV did just not work. Instead, all we got, on any channel, was white static.  I went downstairs and asked the receptionist (the only employee in the entire hotel) to come and fix it. When he couldn’t do anything about it, he told us change rooms. This was unacceptable as we were not willing to go through another round of AC and water checks. Instead, we told him to bring us another TV. He did that and after some fondling with the antenna, we finally got cable TV.

• Although their wifi connection was not strong enough and you couldn’t connect to the Internet in your room, you could do that in the lobby. Unfortunately, the mess and dust made it a really repulsive place to be in.

• I was not able to find the day’s newspaper in the stack of newspapers that was piled up in a corner of the lobby, so we decided to stay in the garden facing the entrance of the hotel and have a drink. But, the booth in the corner of the garden, selling snacks and drinks was closed. I mean, why would they keep it open?

There are so many decent budget hotels around Thamel Street, but Hotel Discovery Inn is definitely not one of them. As a general rule, beware of online review websites, but a Lonely Planet recommendation could be easily taken into consideration.