We stayed in 10 different places during our recent trip to Chile and Argentina. This was the most expensive - which is reasonable as it was a high standard hotel in the centre of Buenos Aires, and you would expect the other cities we visited to be cheaper.

Things were mostly as they should be. Handy location, small pool, well-used, could do with more sunbeds, but there may not be room for them. Turn down service, not something we needed, but as we were in the room, we each collected a little chocolate. Excellent breakfast. The Buenos Aires Herald (English language newspaper) was at our door on one of the three mornings.

The snag was the internet. I see it was criticised before. The problem is not with the networks. There is one network per floor - and I detected floors 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 as being possible. We never actually managed to connect to 5, but, at various times connected to all the others. I suspect the password was different on 5. The password supplied was a particularly complex combination of letters and numbers.

The difficulty was that, although we could connect to the hotel network, they were often not connected to the internet. Sometimes they did, but after an arbitrary period of time, it dropped me, and I had to re-log on. Sometimes it worked, sometimes I managed to work my way through the different networks (awkward password every time), and found one that had connectivity to the internet. We resorted to using the lobby computers (there were only 2) at times. It was all very frustrating as there was something we had to sort out.

Previous comments suggested that customers could not log on in their rooms to the network. That has obviously been solved. However whomever is managing the networks has done a poor job in setting up the router link to the ISP, and in creating the monitoring processes to ensure service is restored when there is a problem.

Internet connectivity is important to us, and out of the 10 places we stayed, this was number 8 or 9. The others were all cheaper. This is not the standard that I should expect from a hotel of this standard, and is the reason that I would not stay here again, or recommend it. If internet connection is unimportant to you, it would be OK. As the management have addressed the networking problem, maybe they will address the connectivity problem. So you can ignore the negative aspects of this review if you find that subsequent reviewers praise the Wi-Fi service.

We ate in the restaurant once. The good steak came overcooked (we had ordered a punto), but we started eating it, and showed it to the waiter. They brought us replacement meals, with the steak cooked correctly, but we were not sure that was going to happen (language difficulties). The waiter had left us the original meals which we continued to eat, with the result we did not have the capacity for the second one. He should have taken the first away when the decision was made to do them again.

We stayed at the Dolmen for 4 days through New Years Eve and the hotel staff was amazing. Our travel agent misspelled our names completely for our reservations and the hotel staff was very prompt in working to resolve the problem quickly. The airline also lost my luggage and the staff members were very helpful in assisting me by making phone calls to the airport/local airline staff to retrieve my bags. Our rooms were clean and just what we needed to come back to after a long day of sight seeing and a night of great food/wine. We had no problems with noise...if anything between the two hotels that we stayed at in BA it was some of the best sleep of the trip but we were at the end of the hall on the back side. So if you're a light sleeper you might want to ask for one of those rooms.

They were also great in giving us suggestions for restaurants, places to go and places to avoid to maximize our time while being safe.

I will say that there pictures of the pool are completely not realistic. The pool/gym does not look anything like the pics and the bar consist of beer in a bucket. That was a real dissapointment but the hotel bar downstairs made up for it w/ great conversation and coffee drinks w/real whipped cream. (Side note--if you ask for real cream in the US you're getting whipped cream out of a can so this was a nice little perk for us).

Also, the free internet access is priceless!

I do not understand why this hotel has such a good rating on Trip Advisor. I spent a week there (from Christmas Day to New Year day) and to me everything about this hotel was 'just barely OK' but nothing more.

Clearness.
The carpet is dirty. The bathroom needs some renovation, too. Everything else is OK.

Service.
Mostly good altough I did not use much of it. They serviced the room twice a day, the second time making a bed. One day when changing the towels they gave just one towel instead of two and did not give a floor mat but the other days everything was OK. The shampoo and soap are of a cheap kind. They charged my room with something that I did not use from the mini-bar but when I told I did not use they reversed the charge, so that was OK.

Breakfast.
Not tasty at all. Choice is small. The same stuff every morning. But it is eatable, not too many people, so it was OK.

Room.
Everything is OK except the air conditioner. The day I checked in was really hot, +36..37C (100F) so I thought it was because of that. But the other days the temperature was lower, around +31C (88F) and it still was not sufficient. I always kept it on the maximum level and the only time it was comfortable was after the middle of the night and the early morning. Other times, it was just liveable but not comfortable.

Internet.
Every floor has its own WiFi point. When I managed to connect to my floor point it was OK but maybe 1 time out of 3 I could not and I had to connect to a different floor in which case it was sooo sloooow...

Location.
Yes, it is close to the subway (subte) station (few blocks) and it is in the safe area. That is good. The bad thing is that Retiro is not a good place for tourists. It is close to a few attracions but not to many of them so most of the times I ended up taking a subway or taxi (and taxi is really not expensive in BsAs so I used them a lot). The problem is that the traffic in this part of the city on weekdays is really, really bad. Few times I was late because I did not expect it would take 10 minutes to pass a few blocks. The city itself is not very pleasant place around the hotel, the sidewalks are narrow, lots of traffic, lots of people, etc. As a tourist I really wished that I stayed in Recoleta, Palermo or maybe Puerto Madero or San Telmo, so again, the location was barely OK for me but definitely not excellent or good.

It was the only hotel available at the time because of an event held in Buenos Aires. The lobby of the hotel was very nice, but little did we know, we were fooled but its outer appearance. The service was not good at all, we had booked 3 rooms (2 rooms for 3 people and one room for 2), and they only had 2 rooms available. We had already paid for the rooms and the system showed that we did order 3 rooms. Although they said that they will fix it (which they did) it was unpleasant to have to arrive to a hotel and have to deal with something like this. As soon as we stepped into the hotel room, we were hit with a blast of hot air. We turned the AC on and unpacked. Everything felt old and dirty. After an hour, the room didn't feel any cooler, we asked for some one to help fix the AC because it was blistering hot. We spent 3 days at the Dolmen, and our AC was never fixed during our stay, so we had to keep out windows open (and listen to the traffic outside) to sleep. Also, the hair dryer didn't work at all. The next morning, we went down for breakfast, the food was mediocre and the staff members were immensely rude to us, they gave us an attitude and it was an unpleasant way to start the day. Our towels in our rooms were never replaced as well, the old towels were taken and new ones were never bothered to be put back. When we were about to check out, they alerted us that we had to pay a fee because some one had charged something to our room. We asked for a receipt which they didn't have, and then we asked for the time and date of the purchase, which turned out to be during New Years Eve, and we were all out partying so it was impossible for us to be at the hotel. They insisted and insisted, so we decided to pay because we were about to be late for out flight. It was an overall disaster, the only good thing was the free internet access in back of the lobby.