Our stay at Hostal Republica was going well until about the 4th day. Having booked a horse riding trip through the hotel’s travel agency, we made the mistake of locking a phone and my wallet (which luckily only contained the equivalent of about £4) into my bag, using a samsonite combination lock (US securite approved), and assuming that they would be safe. It is easy to look back on this and see that we should have put them in the hotel safe with our other valuables.
The following morning, we entered the combination and unlocked the bag to take our items out and found that they had vanished! As the hotel room had been made up prior to our leaving it locked the previous day, our suspicion automatically fell upon the boy who replaced towels in the room as opposed to the maid, as who ever the thief was clearly had a key to our room.
We reported the theft to the hotel reception and were told that the chief suspect had called in to say he wasn’t going to be in for the day, yet somehow this did not seem to make them suspicious of him. The hotel staff palmed us off for the rest of the day, claiming that their workers were above theft. It was only when we made it clear that we were going to the police to report the incident that they actually seemed to take the matter more seriously. The following morning, the manager came to see us to apologise for the theft, claiming that the boy in question had been fired, and that on the event of him actually coming back to the hotel, they would ‘trap him’ and take him straight to the nearest police station. He said that he had been suspicious of him for a while, and that he knew the way in which he had picked the combination lock on our bag. The hotel worker who was translating for us added that the manager was not above using violence on his staff and would definitely get the phone back for us if the boy returned.
We spent the day at the police station making statements, returning that evening with two police men who had been given the task of investigating the incident further. This is where things got really nasty- the hotel Manageress insisted to the police that we were liars who had made up the story in order to claim on our insurance. She told the police that we had probably lost the phone while we were out in the city, and were now trying to put the blame onto the hotel. She had the advantage of being able to speak Spanish and English, whereas we could not speak Spanish to the police officers (who spoke no English), and therefore we could not defend ourselves, which was incredibly frustrating. The towel boy (who clearly had not been fired) was brought into the room with the maid, in order for the manageress to protest their innocence. To try to discredit us further in front of the police, she said that the hotel had no record of us even leaving the room to go on a horse riding trip in the first place, despite the fact that we booked the trip through ‘Hostal Republica Tours’!
Thankfully we were flying home that same night- the whole experience was very upsetting and an unfortunate end to an otherwise great holiday. If we had been the criminal masterminds that the manageress was accusing us of being, then we would have claimed that £400 was stolen as opposed to £4.00. The phone can be replaced, however all of our holiday photos that were on it have gone. Stay somewhere else- this place has big problems that the management are refusing to address.