M Hotel

Acceptable Mid-Range Hotel

The accommodation options in Ljubljana are not the best, so you take what you can get. The M-Hotel at about 70 euros a night is acceptable by local standards, but way overpriced by German or even Austrian standards. It's about 4km from the city center, in a safe but ugly suburb, with tiny rooms and an awful breakfast. On the plus side it has cheap wireless Internet - about 2 euros per day and they only charged me one day for the four days I was there. It also has a balcony, but the view I had was of the neighbouring office block. The staff are excellent and as friendly as you would expect Slovenians to be, but they didn't do a good job of fixing the disgusting smell of bad drains in my room. I had to sleep with the window open the first night, which was a good idea anyway as the radiators were overheating every room. After that the smell disappeared, but seemed to move into the corridor. Soon it was in my neighbour's room, and he was complaining too. The location is great if you are arriving by car, and they have free parking on the side. It's also not infeasible to walk into town, and we did that a few times quite comfortably.

Unique Quality: The breakfast was so bad it's worth commenting on in detail. Bizarrely the hotel is owned by the largest supermarket chain in Slovenia: Mercator. I've shopped in these places before and the food they sell is pretty good: I made myself a great slap-up picnic meal from the delicatessen there in Bled. You'd think the breakfast at the M-Hotel then would be at least as good, but it was the worst I've ever eaten. The coffee in particular gets extremely low marks and was practically undrinkable; this is amazing considering Slovenia generally had extremely good coffee. The bread was stale even when we got up at the crack of dawn for breakfast, and the fruit drinks looked like they would glow in the dark and tasted nothing like the fruit they were advertised as.

From the complaints it sounds terrible, but it wasn't all that bad. Then again I wasn't paying this time, so maybe if it had been my own money I'd be more annoyed. In truth the one-star Bit Center Hotel is way better value, at about a third the price, and similarly located out of the town. That hotel might be a bit spartan and weird looking, and the staff not the friendliest, but at least the breakfast was acceptable. I'll try a different hotel next time, and see if this is a problem endemic with hotels in Ljubljana, or just my bad luck.