We stayed at the Arco in late September. Without the traumatic ending to our stay this would doubtless have been a fairly run of the mill review, agreeing with most of the positive points made by others & mentioning one or two downsides to be aware of.

Firstly this was a wonderfully quiet hotel in a pleasant, calm & safe area of a busy capital city. The breakfast was good. The poor pillows had been recently replaced, not to UK standards but bearable. There were no problems with the ‘do not disturb’ sign being ignored or noisy cleaners.

I had contacted the hotel (on the strength of reviews here) before booking as I sleep v badly: the owner I spoke to didn’t bend over backwards to help but did, with encouragement, manage to juggle his rooms so that we had a top floor room to the back which indeed meant I could sleep.

There was an slightly neurotic atmosphere under the surface ‘in the air’ around reception on our first morning, hard to put your finger on, which meant that after breakfast, when I was still tired & disorientated, & seeking general help & guidance my inept attempts turned into a weird sort of a row, because M Viguié was troubled by my ‘neediness’ & kept zapping back to his beloved computer rather than trying to decipher my requirements & offer general assistance: where to start & nearest Tourist Office etc. I even morphed into speaking French, which wasn’t that easy for me, in an attempt to at least make an effort on my part. This was ignored & the interchange became a low key row despite that. This meant that I dreaded any further encounter for the rest of our stay, which was a shame. It had a knock on effect on my interchanges with Herr Osterloh, as I was on edge & bent over backwards not to be ‘a nuisance’, which shouldn’t really be an overriding factor in one’s dealings with hotel staff. I have good friends who run 2 hotels, and am very aware of the other side of the coin, & know how true professionals process their frustration or annoyance away from their paying guests!!

As two small asides – the main thing that was missing from the rooms from a female perspective was a mirror, aside of the bathroom cabinet one, possibly a full length one being the most helpful [not in the corridors or lift either]. We both found that the shower was fiendishly hard to adjust to a median temperature going from pretty cold to very hot in a millimetre.

However the area around the hotel had a nice selection of echten bars, a friendly Italian deli, the lovely Viktoria Louis Platz, KaDeWe [one phrase – cakes in the roof] luxury Department store, the option of 2 metro stations and above all the glorious Saigon & More, a Vietnamese restaurant just over the road, see sep. review, which you really should visit, even if it seems incongruous on a short stay in Berlin.

I have waited this long to review Arco because of the near catastrophic ending to our stay, needing some distance to judge the tenor of my remarks. Given we departed on the Berlin Marathon weekend [my advice to anyone travelling to Berlin is to avoid this weekend at all costs] & had to catch an overnight sleeper to Budapest at the Hauptbahnhof on the Saturday evening, I made a special effort consult Herr Osterloh about a taxi booking, as the metro journey was particularly awkward, & we’d have heavy luggage to manhandle. It was supposed to be our ‘treat’ to make life easier. How wrong can one be!! The taxi was booked by the hotel owner in front of me, mentioning all the salient facts & adding that we could also catch the train at the Sudbahnhof, if the driver judged that to be wiser when he collected us, depending on his experience of the traffic during the early evening. Huh!!

We returned to the hotel an hour before our taxi was due, collected our belongings kept safely for us, repacked a bit & waited. I chatted for a while, in French as far as I remember, with the lady receptionist on duty & even jokingly said that I would now begin to be nervous about 10 minutes before the taxi was due, she assured me she would be the same. I’m not surprised!!

In summary we waited a good 5 minutes after the due time before the receptionist rang the taxi firm. As it was a Saturday night, getting through took a while. She asked about our taxi. The replies seemed a bit vague. She asked the taxi firm to ring back with precise information; that took a while. The clock was definitely ticking!! The ensuing conversation in German, which I understood, was not encouraging. Her comment was that the taxi should keep coming but we would also look for alternatives. This was her crucial mistake. She should have either handed me the telephone or on my behalf insisted that the nearest taxi was diverted immediately to collect us as we had a long distance train to catch & time was running out.

It is hard for me to describe the next half hour. It was pouring with rain. My husband stood at a nearby relatively quiet intersection, in the middle of the road, attempting not to give in to desperation, & trying to flag down any rare taxis, to no avail. The receptionist, having given up ringing any other taxis almost instantly saying it was a busy Saturday evening, stood outside the hotel under a huge umbrella – gallic shrug all but visible looking for a non-existent taxi.

I stood with our luggage by reception, looking again at the timetable to check when the train stopped at the Sudbahnhof – now our only hope - & finally went out in the rain, and tantamount to ‘hijacked’ an ordinary motorist who had the misfortune to park outside, my German breaking down under the strain of our situation. I won’t go into the details here – there really is plenty more, including the eventual € 50 bribe my husband resorted to. We finally drew up to the Sudbahnhof at a 3rd attempt as each car-entrance was blocked by building work, and ran like demented soaked dervishes into the side entrance of the station where there were of course no boards to indicate where our train was due to draw in any second NOW!!!!

So this was really a near disaster, made worse as we knew there’d have been no beds in Berlin that night. My husband felt that as the booking was made by the hotel – we assumed with the company they always used – the Arco management would at the very least express real regret at our unfortunate experience, and hopefully be the conduit for some form of complaint to the taxi firm; my husband felt he had a right to demand our € 50 back.

On our return I sent Herr Osterloh one simple sentence asking for a comment on our unpleasant experience. He didn’t even bother to reply. My husband then typed a full email spelling out how he felt. The tone of the eventual reply really shocked us; the opening sentence was: ‘there is still high season and some guests can be quite demanding, so we are really busy at the moment.’ What does this mean? That most guests are a time-consuming pain? That they don’t have time for a courteous reply? That really it was us who had been unacceptably ‘demanding’? It ended with this disclaimer: ‘.we are not responsable (sic) for a taxi driver or the service of the agency.’ Surely if the hotel books using their regular firm & a customer is SO badly let down, the hotel can be a vital intermediary in these circumstances, without taking full responsibility. Saying that: ‘Apart from that Mrs. M had done, what she could do and said (sic), what was to say. She complained to the agency and advised you to do the same.’ Just saying ‘that’s not very good’ over the phone doesn’t count as a complaint in my book. This is tantamount to a brush off – it is very hard to complain in another language from far away!!

So yes by all means use the Arco for all the reasons indicated on Trip Advisor [I decided to click 'recommend to a friend' with the following proviso] but be aware the owners live quite far away, have no car to help in an emergency & are not inclined to go the extra mile during or after a serious mishap!! There is an underlying attitude to guests as time-consuming inconveniences that makes me feel justified in including this sad ending to our stay as part of my review.