Stayed here end of May 07 for 4 nights. Having read some other reviews did not know what to expect with it being my first time to eastern Europe. The Hotel was positioned about 30 mins walk from the Old Town (main area for sightseeing and drinking). Not a great looking building and some of the local area did not look the best. The rooms while old and slightly worn were well maintained in a clean manner, and evidence of good cleaning practice were throughout the Hotel. The few staff we met were friendly, with the execption of the breakfast girl who never smiled or replenished items. Breakfast was very basic, not your big greasy fry up that I am used to in Hotels over here, but I will say it was adequate and set me up for the day.
My rooms was big and spacious, however the bathroom was small and the brown fittings did not help, did find a strange smell at times in the bathroom, the heated towel rail seems to be on 24/7 so it is an idea to close the bathroom door to prevent it heating the rooms if the weather is good.
Access to the old town is easy, walked it in 30 mins, tram is 5 mins from Hotel and costs 30 centines.

Oveall I enjoyed the stay, while the Hotel is basic, all I needed was a bed to get some sleep when I was not exploring or drinking.

wel this place is not good our room was so small it was bad. When we got there it seemed ok this was a big mistake on the first night my freind cut his thumb there was a bit of blood on the sheets ok so we thought when we got back to the hotel later we where charged 56 lats for cleaning them ok fair enough we paid we got back to the room and the same sheets still on bed we wnt to reception and was meet with a dont care attitude we woke on sat morn for a hot continetal breakfast we had ham,cheese and a bit of apple juice i know that this is thebreakfast but there was no coffee as we are going out for the day we got called back to reception where we was handed a bill for a plantpot? 50lats not paying was not us off we went came back later to find they will not give us our cases untill we did pay for the plantpot that had nothing to do with us in the end we paid because they said they will phone the police i didnt want to spend the night in a latvian police station. my friend ask for a plaster they had NO first aid box as a result he spent 2 days in hospital. as we left to go to the airport they tried again to give us a bill for 20 lats for pay tv we didnt have all they wanted was to make money out of us the people of latvia are nice and friendly but that hotel put me right off

OK so it's a long way from the centre (2 or 3km) but the tram stops five minutes up the road and run very frequently until quite late.

OK so it's a Stalinist monstrosity, but at least it's got a bit of character to it unlike many bland chain hotels today!

OK there's a railway yard with 24-hour shunting; this, IMO, is infinitely better than 24-hour screeching English stag idiots! (and they're not DMU's, they're 2M62's... ;-) )

OK the area could be better, but it felt safe to me even late at night - if you don't find outlying eastern-bloc estates (albeit low-rise ones!) safe then stick to the expensive properties in the centre.

All in all, we had a good time there; the bathroom was a bit pokey, the windows encouraged basejumping by opening fully on the 9th floor, but the breakfast was nice enough and it's easy to get into the centre via tram. There's also a supermarket by the tramstop for those 30p bottles of beer (mmmmmm, Uzavas!) and for the price we paid you just can't go wrong.

Put it this way, we also stayed in the Kolonna and preferred the Karavella by a long way! (it's not all about location, you need some character...)

Cheep and cheerful for a stag do, or it would be if the staff smiled. Having said that most people don’t smile very often at all in Latvia after years of communist oppression smiling as was any sign of enjoyment was a bad thing and that’s just the way it is. If a pretty young woman smiles at you she’s probably doing it for money, beware!

As for the hotel it’s a good 25 min walk from the old town and located in a really rough dock area, as someone mentioned previously, the trains seem to run at night, this is when it seems they do all the shunting in the yard next door and its very noisy, you wont get much peace. But if you’re a train spotter this is the place for you, double headed DMU’s pulling miles of coal trucks, the coal being unloaded from docks in front of you.

The rooms are big enough and have double glazing handy to keep the noise of the train yard out but be careful when opening it as they open fully inwards making suicide attempts a breeze, something you might contemplate if you stayed here long enough.

There are no brewing facilities in the rooms which would have been a bonus but after smelling the water from the bathroom taps suggests the water is fed from roof tanks, brushing your teeth in the iron smelling water is a new experience and one not to be missed.

The bathrooms have no extraction fans so if you’re sharing a room with your mate make sure they are of reasonable hygiene! The shower cubicle in our room had a curtain which was pretty pointless as the plug hole didn’t drain as fast as the water entered via the shower meaning the tiny bathroom soon became a wet room. The shower its self had a very simple two tap mixer with no thermostat, very interesting hot and cold experience to be had for the brave.

The heated towel rail was an interesting communist utilitarian bit of pipe work, a u-bend made from 40mm pipe work, ingenious place to hang your towels which are replaced everyday with postage stamp bits of cloth one for each part of the body I presume.

The beds are firm and the mattresses stained with an assortment of colours cleverly hidden from view with a delightful bed sheet possibly reclaimed from a decommissioned German u-boat.

There is a colour TV in the rooms with pay porn which could be the only thing you understand except one English speaking channel, CNN, which get very boring after the first 10 mins, as did the porn channel.

The breakfast is served 0700 till 1000 hrs and consists mostly of cheese and cheese but if you look carefully in the breadbin you will find the odd sausage and scrambled egg. Be careful though, as the other sort of scrambled egg is in fact smoked fish was quite tasty. Brown bread isn’t, its kind of a malt loaf affair, an acquired taste it would seem, one acquired from birth I’d suggest.

The [mostly] female staff are, on the whole, exceptionally good looking bordering on stunning, which will prepare you things to come in Riga.
The Guinness book of records states Latvia has the highest percentage of female to male population in the world they just forgot to mention how beautiful the woman are and someone forgot to tell the women how to smile. If you get the chance to chat to them you soon realise they are just very shy and don’t trust Western European men.

There is a sauna in the hotel but will cost you 15 Lev just to turn it on for an hour so I imagine its still in the bubble wrap it arrived in.

The bar has a good selection of beer and whisky but sadly closes at around 2300 / 2400 hrs and is reasonably priced, again the staff require some warming up so choose your words carefully, be patient and might just get the odd smile and bit of eye contact.

As previously mentioned the hotel is in the middle of a rough looking council estate but to be honest you felt safer walking through it at night than walking through the streets of Manchester, and you won’t see any gangs of hooded children out grafting. Sadly you will see persistent begging, quite often from 10-12 year kids.

Where ever possible book your taxis through your hotel and buy taxi vouchers from the reception, the Latvians are very short sighted and greedy when it comes to tourism so be prepared to haggle with the drivers and make sure your holiday insurance covers you for street racing and time trials as the roads are cobbled racetracks which sometimes get used as a form of transport.

I’d recommend the use of a guide for at least one night out around the town, have a look on the interweb first, ours was found by searching for Baltic stags and worth every penny .

Overall the hotel is cheep not so cheerful and in the wrong place. It might sell its self as 3 stars but one must assume this is rated by communist standards.

Riga on the other hand, is a fascinating up and coming town and one that’s going to end up like Prague I expect, so visit now and you’ll get a very interesting perspective on Baltic life with probably some of the most stunning women in the world.

With climate change, Global disasters and declining fish stocks, this is one place you can still definitely say there’s plenty of fish in the sea.