{"id":10208,"date":"2024-04-23T21:36:57","date_gmt":"2024-04-23T19:36:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/expatkaliningrad.com\/?p=10208"},"modified":"2024-05-09T23:22:07","modified_gmt":"2024-05-09T21:22:07","slug":"tawerna-rybaki-gdansk-old-town-a-warning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/expatkaliningrad.com\/ru\/tawerna-rybaki-gdansk-old-town-a-warning\/","title":{"rendered":"Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning to the Unwary!<\/strong>
Piwna 9\/10, Srodmiescie, Gda\u0144sk, 80-831, Poland<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

23 April 2024 ~ Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note (added 9 May 2024): Booking.com asked me several times to leave a review of my ‘hotel room experience’. It was a tad difficult, as I never got inside of it, but, anyway, I left a review. When I checked the reviews on Booking.com’s page for Tawerna Rybaki, I found mine via the link, but when I checked again using their ‘slider’ on the page, only positive reviews appeared. So, it’s ‘magnificent’, ‘wonderful’, ‘the best ever’ … as I intimate in my post headline, “a warning to the unwary”. Perhaps I should have included the word ‘collusion’ \ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This story is sad but true. Its main protagonists are the world\u2019s largest online travel agency, a so-called \u2018apartment\u2019 in Gdansk and last, but by all means least ~ or so it would seem ~ me, the customer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few weeks ago, I was returning from the UK to Kaliningrad. As you will know if you have read my earlier post, the journey is an onerous one<\/a>: early morning, 4am start; Wizz Air to Gdansk; taxi to Gdansk bus station; three hours of loitering in Gdansk waiting for the bus connection; two-hour bus journey to the Polish-Russian borders; one-and-a-half-hours processing time at the borders (if you are lucky); forty-five minute journey to Kaliningrad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI know,\u201d I thought, in an excited moment of uncharacteristic exhilaration, \u201cI\u2019ll break the journey up. I\u2019ll stay overnight in Gdansk and catch the bus to Kaliningrad refreshed the following morning. What a spiffing idea!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intoxicated (it\u2019s those English ales, you know!) by the cunningness of my plan, specifically the chance it would avail me of spending an afternoon sight-seeing around Gdansk Old Town and thereafter a relaxed evening dining out in a restaurant of my choice, I was on Google before you could say \u2018you will only end up on Booking.com\u2019, and two minutes later, having keyed \u2018Hotels in Gdansk\u2019 into the browser, there I was, on Booking.com.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now Gdansk, like any other large tourist city, is not short of a hotel or two, and before I could apply one of the many Booking.com filters, I had been directed to the most expensive hotels in the city. My stay was an out-of-season booking, when \u00a3120+ seemed a tad extravagant for crashing out for the night.  The in-season prices, or rather open season on gullible punters\u2019 bank accounts, are beyond a profligate\u2019s dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Screenshots from hotel-booking websites taken on, appropriately, April Fool\u2019s Day, 2 April 2024 (April Fool!), show that the in-season prices for almost all accommodation in Gdansk has trebled. If you are a real mug, you can even pay in excess of \u00a3600 a night just to slide between the sheets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I personally, could never justify paying anything like that, even if I had a name like Elon Muskrat, after all a bed\u2019s a bed, and unless you\u2019ve got a nice bit of totty with you and don\u2019t mind being sexist by saying so, what\u2019s the point of stumping up more dosh than you would if you accidently went to a brothel. And you would; wouldn\u2019t you!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, I was looking for somewhere perhaps not exactly as cheap as chips or for the price of a shish kebab from fatty Abdul\u2019s burger bar, but at least pegged at a price so that I would not cry come the morning after, “They should really invent a pill for this! Oh why, oh why did I open my wallet last night!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Applying Booking.com\u2019s filters, but sparingly (one can have quite enough of a silly thing), their search engine unearthed several hotels that accorded with my budget and requirements, namely rooms at 40 to 60 pounds a night and a hotel in easy walking distance of the city\u2019s bus station. Clapped-out, Gdansk bus station is the hole in the crown where the jewel never was, and so say all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within seconds I was faced with a series of affordable options, including something that I had never used before, rentable apartments. Apartment is such a wonderful word, is it not? It certainly beats \u2018flat\u2019 or \u2018bedsit\u2019 or a single room with no hotel lobby and no staff on hand to help you out in the unlikely event that something goes wrong, and some of these apartments in Gdansk, when taken out of season, are as cheap as the paper we used to wrap chips in before the EU ruled that we couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!<\/strong>
Piwna 9\/10, Srodmiescie, Gda\u0144sk, 80-831, Poland<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Always one for adventure ~ I bought a new cravat last week ~ I latched onto an interesting place, the exotic name of which, appealing photographs and exquisite reviews plastered over the net were surely too good to be true. Let me just repeat that, \u2018Too good to be true!\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The place in question, and I had no question to ask, after all wasn\u2019t I about to book this \u2018apartment\u2019 via one of the net\u2019s most acclaimed online accommodation booking sites, Booking.com, was called Tawerna Rybaki Old Town. I repeat: Tawerna Rybaki Old Town<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLet\u2019s do it!\u201d I said, saying it out loud, as if somebody else was with me, a party to my decision. There\u2019s confidence for you!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And by Jove, I did it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

At 39 quid for the night, and as Booking.com\u2019s receipts rolled into my email inbox (and don\u2019t they just!), I  do not mind admitting, I was feeling rather smug. But that was because at that point in time I assumed I was all booked up, rather than being something else that inconveniently rhymes with that phrase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A couple of days rolled by (I probably went to the pub in between.), when, for some inexplicable reason, possibly prompted by that fate-tempting phrase, \u2018in the unlikely event that something should go wrong\u2019, I returned to my booking receipt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was all looking self-explanatory, until I spotted something that I thought was rather odd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a box within the tabulation, a third of the way down the page, a statement appeared in English ~ ‘A door code is needed’ ~ and beneath it a longer sentence, but this was written in Polish. I copied the sentence in Polish and pasted it into Google\u2019s translator, but it did not tell me anything that I did not already not know, such as where was the code that was needed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary!<\/strong>
Piwna 9\/10, Srodmiescie, Gda\u0144sk, 80-831, Poland<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I searched through the plethora of booking receipts but found nowt. So, I emailed the apartment owners using the email link on the form and left it at that. Two days passed ~ nothing. I emailed again, ensuring that my second email was flagged \u2018urgent\u2019. As before, I received no reply. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was surely time to get in touch with Booking.com and ask for clarification. If only life was as easy as it was before the internet!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Booking.com ~ Is there anybody there?\ud83d\udc7b <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Booking.com had sent three or four automated emails to me regarding my booking, none of which, as far as I could see, contained their contact information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Google search for Booking.com\u2019s telephone number or a live chat option unearthed several dud numbers and no live chat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a sense of intense foreboding, fuelled by d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu (we’ve all been here on the net), I turned to their website \u2014 nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPerhaps,\u201d I mused, \u201cthey want me to open an account so that they can fill my email inbox with a load of shitey ads.\u201d I was already running out of time and patience, so I placed my trust in my email spam box and signed up as they wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And here is where the nightmare truly began. Next stop the Twilight Zone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We all know, or should know from hard and frustrating experience, that many, far too many, online-only trading companies, large, exclusive and monopolistic, demonstrate unparalleled expertise in the art of concealing their contact details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The irony of this is that we are supposedly living in the so-called information age; communication made easy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Booking.com are by no means the only organisation whose website is constructed like a maze, with lots of circuitous paths, junctions and dead ends guaranteed to flummox anyone impudent or desperate enough to try to speak to someone or  message a real human entity, something preferably in human form, possessing eyes, ear holes, a voice, and maybe even a brain, with which to reply to queries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I appreciate, of course, that Booking.com is an aggravator, sorry, I meant to say aggregator, and as such does not want to encourage every Tom, Dick and Ikmar to swamp the lady at customer support with a lot of unnecessary questions. But when accommodation proprietors who have already taken your dough shun your attempts to contact them, then, to quote the telephone ad of old, it really is “nice to talk”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The slideshow below illustrates how well hidden Booking.com’s contact details are. Apologies for the ‘misty’ images, but symbolically speaking they capture perfectly the obscurantism encountered in searching for what could and should be a simple highlighted click away, ie ‘Contact Customer Support’. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

  • \"Booking.com
    Booking.com: Welcome to the Help Centre<\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \"Booking.com
    Booking.com:Fill in the booking details<\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \"Booking.com
    Booking.com: How to open the next window?<\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \"Booking.com
    Booking.com: You must type in something, ie 'Key'. Click on 'Other topics' at the end of the list.<\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \"Booking.com
    Booking.com: Click on 'Something else'.<\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \"Booking.com
    Booking.com: Click on \u2018More Options\u2019<\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \"Booking.com
    Booking.com: There's the Contact options: fingers crossed!!!<\/div><\/div><\/li>
  • \"Booking.com
    Booking.com: Believe it or not ...<\/div><\/div><\/li><\/ul><\/div>