Terrible place. The hotel is amongst the worst I have ever seen 3 stars?! Wow I can’t imagine what a 1 or 2 star hotel would look like. The pictures on the Net were taken very skillfully. Let’s start positive: the two things that are good are the cleanliness and the (5 euro) breakfast. I must admit that I have been in a few ‘higher class’ hotels which were less clean and paid way more for a breakfast buffet of lesser quality. Now the bad: I arrived after a 20 hour journey at 9 in the morning. I had asked and had gotten the confirmation back that I could check in early. When I arrived the guy at the reception said that the room wouldn’t be ready till 3. After some irritated words from my side he could get that back to noon.. I had to go to our head office in my 20 hour old travel clothes, unshaven and having not slept for 27 hours straight. Imagine the great first impression, luckily the people at the office were more than understanding. I returned to the Novum at 1PM and my room was ready. I went upstairs (5th floor) to find a closet with a bed in it. The room was so small that I couldn’t even lay my suitcase flat on the floor because of the single-plus-a-couple-of-inches bed. The bathroom was the size of my washing machine at home. I took a shower and laid down on the bed: A frame with an extremely uncomfortable plastic mattress with a 3 foot wide duvet on it. I was so dead tired that I fell asleep but woke up in the middle of the night and started thinking that I hadn’t figured out emergency escape routes yet. I got out of bed and reviewed the map on the door. I actually went out of my room to check out the emergency exits because I started getting paranoid. The building is really old and with a wooden frame that would light up like a torch in no time during a fire. I found out that the central stairway was the main emergency exit and the other one was a route that led towards a hotel room! Imagine being in a fire and having to break into a hotel room to get to the emergency exit!! Furthermore, the route to the exit leads through the center of the hotel, where the stairwell is, and where a fire would have the easiest path to develop (chimney effect). So there you have two escape routes close to each other, one of them being behind a locked door.. I had at that point already complained and was promised another room the next day. I came back to the hotel on day 2, got my new room key and went to the fourth floor to find my new room. The fire safety situation was the same. I opened my room door to find a slightly larger room with two “beds” of about 3 feet wide. Possibly a worse room than I had in the first place!! I grabbed my suitcase, went downstairs and told the girl at the front desk that I was going to a different hotel. My stay in Hamburg was for 22 nights and I was planning to spend them at the Novum. I had prepaid 1780 euros which they informed me was non-refundable. I told them that I would pay for the one night I stayed but that they best give me back the rest. I left it with that and in the taxi on the way to the Mercure hotel I called American Express Platinum Service to freeze the funds and start a dispute procedure. I found rooms for the rest of my stay at the Mercure, Suite Novotel, and Novotel. All great basic large chain hotels of excellent quality which cost me THE SAME average nightly price as the Novum!! The only thing is that these hotels don’t offer the same cheap breakfast but Hamburg is full of bakeries with really nice freshly baked sandwiches for even less than 5 euros..

Something about the neighborhood the Novum is in. This part of town is really rough. There are (male and female) prostitutes and pimps on the street, they talk to you when you walk by. There are sex shops everywhere, in fact the hotel entrance is wedged between two massive sexshops with “private dvd cabins”. I was disgusted just walking by these places. There is a big gay community in this neighborhood. Rainbow flags everywhere and there is a gay sauna right around the corner. I have nothing against gay people, but the guys here are just plainly disgusting. I sat down for dinner in this shabby kebab place and was checked out by this guy in a way that I lost my appetite and left. The one night I spent at the hotel I woke up from screaming on the streets a few times, I don’t even want to know what was going on. When it wasn’t screaming it were sirens. This is really the part of the city “where the sun don’t shine”. I almost bought a can of pepper spray, but got out instead.