23 June 2024 ~ Hotel Mercure Gdansk reasons to stay there!
You may recall, if you were listening to me (“Now, pay attention, as I will be asking questions later!” ) that returning from the UK to Kaliningrad, I made the fatal mistake of booking via Booking.com the apartment Tawerna Rybaki in Old Town Gdansk. To all extents and purposes, the apartment never existed, and I was left on the streets of Gdansk, me and my faithful laptop, with nowhere to lay my head for the night.
The subsequent hunt for alternative accommodation was a long and arduous one, eventually culminating, not before time, at Gdansk’s Mercure Hotel.
Although I appreciate that my positive affirmation of the Mercure’s finer points may be tinged by the fact that at the time I was desperate and ‘any port in a storm’ had become my alma mater (original use of the term), in reviewing the Mercure Hotel, I have attempted to put the object of my misfortunes, the bogus Rybaki apartment, as far behind me as I can and write with objectivity.
So, here we go: My first reaction to the Mercure was “Oh, it’s a tower block”; my second, “It looks a tad upmarket for a chap who just wants a bed for the night”; my third, “Bugger this for a game of soldiers, I have been walking around for hours. I need to book in somewhere and head off to a bar!”
Getting the feel of the place
On the other side of its perpetual revolving door, the Mercure’s interior is TARDISial. It’s grand, it’s palatial, it’s swish, say your senses, but once you have checked in and taken a second look your senses qualify your first impression with ‘it is also rather passe’.
The lobby, indeed the Mercure in its entirety, has a distinctly 1980s’ look and a period feel to go with it. It is not faded and jaded, on the contrary, the hotel could not be more 1980s than if it was still the 1980s. And yet, it is not unfair to say that the swish has lost its swashbuckle.
Nevertheless, there is enough of the right thing going on in its aircraft hangar interior to strike the gong of plush. The vast space is broken down into open-plan units: seating areas with big, spongey recliners, coffee-table resting points, unusual modernist sculptures, a shimmering shiny floor, downlighters, uplighters, pendulous globular basket lampshades, and, ah yes, at the back of the room, that all-important traveller’s requisite the hotel lounge and bar. Don’t leave home without one!
It had been a long day for me when I booked in to the Mercure, and I was dying to use the loo, so I was not entirely enamoured when I was given a plastic card instead of a good old-fashioned key. First off, I shoved it in the hole, and it did not work the lift; then I nipped quickly off to the toilet, and it did not work the toilet lock, then when I rushed up to my room in it went and opened the door, ruining whatever chance I had of changing my pants and complaining. Just in the nick of plastic-card time!
My opinion of the interior downstairs décor, that it was 1980s, was given a serious leg up when the lift went ching on the hotel’s sixth floor. In contrast to the capacious lobby, the sixth-floor landing and long, long corridor was a little Alice in Wonderland. I felt as if I had sipped from Alice’s ‘Drink Me!’ bottle, and now my head was touching the ceiling.
The imposing and all-suffusing chocolate browns of the carpet, which match the tones of the doors, the walls and the ceiling, and which are brought into intimate proximity thanks to the carpet’s thick and heavy mercurial globular patterns and their blotting paper absorption of the well-intentioned low-lit lighting, has 1980s stamped right through them like a piece of seaside rock, and the rooms, or at least my room, completed that turn of the retro page.
Turning back the page need not be disagreeable if, like me, you find that direction infinitely more appealing than moving with the times. Thus, although the tones of the hotel room, at least the room in which I was staying, followed the lead of the communal areas in their 1980s’ love of chocolate, the amenities therein neither added to nor subtracted from the context of backdated.
There was everything you would expect to get from a hotel of this scale and calibre. It came in spades and with enough variation to seduce you into believing that it offered more than you had expected and all with an extra air of luxury tinged with a personal touch.
The lighting alone was sufficient to do this to you. Ambient lighting, lighting for reading, mood lighting, soft lighting and lighting to get you in the mood ~ multiple combinations of it and all at the flick of a switch ~ or two.
Not the Hotel California, hence no mirrors on the ceiling, for which I was truly grateful. For I would not wish to inflict on myself a view of myself like that first thing in the morning! But the room did have its fair share of mirrors, including, above the convenient desk, a nice, big, long, rectangular one, which looks a bit like a telly? I could not tell you for certain as I have not used one for years.
The seating was also variegated to suit every type and class of bum. And there was an adequate wardrobe with sliding doors and adequate chests with sliding drawers. And a bed with a firm and comfortable mattress, on which to sleep and what have you.
The 1980s was not so primitive as to exclude the presence of an ensuite bathroom, and neither, I am glad to report, was my 21st century room. It had a credible bath and shower room and even contained a toilet, which was just as well in the circumstances, as a tower-block hotel with a lavvy out back in the yard would be mighty inconvenient.
Ah, excuse me, I almost forgot, there was also a safe to put things in, if only you knew how to use it (I believe you put your bits inside, then close the door and lock it Mick.) (Quite so.), and the room comes equipped with its very own window, which is useful for letting in natural light, which if there was no window, you would need to bring your own natural light, and, of course, when letting in light and even when it is not, the window comes in handy when you get the urge to look out of it.
I am not about to pretend that the view from my window was actually inspiring, but equally shall not argue that it was not. As the photograph below reveals, the view does capture Gdansk; the new Gdansk and the old.
Excited by the red-brick church, you swear on a pint of good beer that as soon as you have unpacked your things, attended dutifully to your reasonable ablutions and put on a different cravat, you will point your brogues decisively in the direction that you want to go and permit them to carry you off towards the architectural/historic masterpiece that those ever-inventive Poles did christen the Old Town.
Unfortunately, however, although the Mercure Hotel is devilishly close for on-foot types to the town’s historic quarter, my shoes belong to an era, as I do myself, in which modern navigation aids play no understandable part.
I could have asked the way of course, but that would have been too easy and obviously much too sensible, and so, of course, I didn’t. I simply relied on my sense of direction, and for once I got it right.
This is something else that speaks in Mercure’s favour. If, like me, never becoming a navigator was one of the most applaudable things you did in your life, then the Mercure should appeal to you. Its name emblazoned in bright white light at the very top of its tower acts like a lighthouse beacon. It can be seen from many points of the compass and therefore can be used in co-operation with other landmarks to guide you safely home in the unlikely event you have drunk too much after a night on the town.
In summarising my Mercure experience, I would say “a solid hotel ~ rock solid”. Comfortable, appealing ~ in a slightly old-fashioned sort of way ~ and supremely atmospheric, it effortlessly brings together the feel of a hotel somewhere above its station with a kindly welcome that is home-from-home. The bar, my natural habitat, has that cushty, big upmarket hotel, relaxing, come-hither air. You just order yourself a drink and sink yourself carefree into its soft and sumptuous seats. The staff are as pleasant as they are helpful; the service cannot be faulted. Everything around you is as easy on the eye as it is upon the senses, which is quite an achievement in itself as the hotel contains some visual surprises. And in its relativity to Gdansk’s Old Town and to the central railway station, if any hotel deserves the accolade of being well-appointed then that hotel is the Mercure.
I know and I do appreciate that on that fateful day when I first laid eyes upon it, the Mercure appeared on my troubled horizon like an oasis in a desert of lies and deceit, but be that as it may, from any objective viewpoint, the Mercure delivers the goods and with it value for money. What else would you expect? It is not for nothing that it derives its name from the Roman God of Travellers!
The main thing
Hotel Mercure Gdańsk Stare Miasto Jana Heweliusza 22, 80-890 Gdańsk, Poland
Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning to the Unwary! Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland
23 April 2024 ~ Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town a Warning!
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’ 🤔
This story is sad but true. Its main protagonists are the world’s largest online travel agency, a so-called ‘apartment’ in Gdansk and last, but by all means least ~ or so it would seem ~ me, the customer.
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: 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.
“I know,” I thought, in an excited moment of uncharacteristic exhilaration, “I’ll break the journey up. I’ll stay overnight in Gdansk and catch the bus to Kaliningrad refreshed the following morning. What a spiffing idea!”
Intoxicated (it’s 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 ‘you will only end up on Booking.com’, and two minutes later, having keyed ‘Hotels in Gdansk’ into the browser, there I was, on Booking.com.
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 £120+ seemed a tad extravagant for crashing out for the night. The in-season prices, or rather open season on gullible punters’ bank accounts, are beyond a profligate’s dream.
Screenshots from hotel-booking websites taken on, appropriately, April Fool’s 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 £600 a night just to slide between the sheets.
I personally, could never justify paying anything like that, even if I had a name like Elon Muskrat, after all a bed’s a bed, and unless you’ve got a nice bit of totty with you and don’t mind being sexist by saying so, what’s the point of stumping up more dosh than you would if you accidently went to a brothel. And you would; wouldn’t you!
No, I was looking for somewhere perhaps not exactly as cheap as chips or for the price of a shish kebab from fatty Abdul’s 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!”
Applying Booking.com’s 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’s bus station. Clapped-out, Gdansk bus station is the hole in the crown where the jewel never was, and so say all of us.
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 ‘flat’ or ‘bedsit’ 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’t.
Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary! Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland
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, ‘Too good to be true!’
The place in question, and I had no question to ask, after all wasn’t I about to book this ‘apartment’ via one of the net’s most acclaimed online accommodation booking sites, Booking.com, was called Tawerna Rybaki Old Town. I repeat: Tawerna Rybaki Old Town.
“Let’s do it!” I said, saying it out loud, as if somebody else was with me, a party to my decision. There’s confidence for you!
And by Jove, I did it!
Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town
At 39 quid for the night, and as Booking.com’s receipts rolled into my email inbox (and don’t 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.
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, ‘in the unlikely event that something should go wrong’, I returned to my booking receipt.
It was all looking self-explanatory, until I spotted something that I thought was rather odd.
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’s translator, but it did not tell me anything that I did not already not know, such as where was the code that was needed?
Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary! Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland
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 ‘urgent’. As before, I received no reply.
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!
Booking.com ~ Is there anybody there?👻
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.
A Google search for Booking.com’s telephone number or a live chat option unearthed several dud numbers and no live chat.
With a sense of intense foreboding, fuelled by déjà vu (we’ve all been here on the net), I turned to their website — nothing.
“Perhaps,” I mused, “they want me to open an account so that they can fill my email inbox with a load of shitey ads.” 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.
And here is where the nightmare truly began. Next stop the Twilight Zone.
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.
The irony of this is that we are supposedly living in the so-called information age; communication made easy!
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.
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”.
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’.
Booking.com: Welcome to the Help Centre
Booking.com:Fill in the booking details
Booking.com: How to open the next window?
Booking.com: You must type in something, ie 'Key'. Click on 'Other topics' at the end of the list.
Booking.com: Click on 'Something else'.
Booking.com: Click on ‘More Options’
Booking.com: There's the Contact options: fingers crossed!!!
Booking.com: Believe it or not ...
As soon as you are directed to ‘Please read our FAQs’ (Frequently Asked Quackery), you can be sure that you are dealing with a company that will stop at nothing to thwart your outrageous ambition to speak to someone human. Rest assured, that you will never find what you are looking for by reading FAQs — an abbreviation that should be changed under the Trades Description Act to reflect what it actually stands for. I suggest FKUs.
Finding the means by which to communicate directly with Booking.com requires the patience of Gungadin ~ perhaps it was he who designed the site. “Hello, can I speak to Mister Mykel Hart, please…” to be said in a sing-songy Asian voice.
But, as it applied to my experience, there was no one there to talk to, not from India, from Pakistan not even from Asian Leicester.
I had signed up to Booking.com; I had spun the internet roulette wheel: round and around and around we go, where we’ll end up nobody knows.
Having entered an Edgar Allan Poe nightmare world, I eventually find a link to the ‘HELP (for Pity’s Sake Help Me, Somebody!) Centre!!!!’ But it does not end there!
I click on the Help Centre link and am taken to a Welcome to the Help Centre window. ‘Send us a message’ or ‘Call us’ does not take you anywhere. The options are to ‘Sign into your account’ or ‘Continue without an account’. I had already had a brief whizz around the signed-in account and had whizzed out of it again, having found nothing that I wanted and lots of what I could do without, so I decided to plump for the ‘Continue without an account’ option.
I am then asked to fill in my booking details, which I did with gratitude.
The next window asks: ‘How can we help?’ Beneath this there is a whole list of fob-off things that you do not want help with. But no visible means by which to talk to or to message someone. So, I click on ‘More’, which is at the bottom of the list. Note, however, that in order not to go around and around and around on the seemingly never-ending carousel, you must type something in the search box, even if it is only ‘arseholes!’ I refrained and typed in ‘key’.
In the next window the name and dates of my apartment appeared with a little picture next to it, and below this another lost, sorry, I meant to type ‘list’, headed ‘Things you can do’, which looked very much the same as the list two pages back, except, perhaps, for the option ‘Please Commit Suicide, which was not included, since the site designer was no doubt convinced that by the time you reached this window you would instinctively want to jump out of it.
Not wanting to oblige, I clicked instead on ‘Other topic’ at the end of the list (where else?!). The last of three options in this list was the intentionally vague, ‘Something else’. Heaven forbid that they might indicate that this was where you might find a telephone number or a messaging option.
Are you still with me at this point? I know the feeling!
The next window was called ‘Get in touch!’
“Yu don’t say!!’
But the recommended option was to contact the owners of the property. This was an absolute ‘No No’, as I had already received no replies to two emails and did not want a third.
So, we click on ‘More contact options’.
Once again, the drowning man instead of getting a life raft is thrown a straw, as you are siphoned off again down the dead-end direction of the never-answering property owners. But here, at last, is a chance to communicate. You’ve ducked and dived and weaved and woven and at last more by luck than design you find yourself at the core of the puzzle. The options open to you are to telephone customer service or send them a type-written message. I opted for the latter, as I wanted them to respond in writing.
And so it was, having travelled in my mind to the very antipodes of Distress and Despair, I wrote:
“I note in my booking there is reference to a key code to access the property. However, it is not clear whether there will be someone at the property to provide this code, or if the code should have been included in the booking confirmation. I have contacted the property twice by email for clarification, but they have not replied. Please advise.”
I did get a response. I wondered if I would. But I wasn’t convinced. Here it was stated that the owners of Twanky Dillo apartment would send me by telephone or email the entry code for the apartment on the morning of my booking. I did not like it, but I left it like that. ‘Don’t hold your breath!’ was the maxim that sprang to mind.
Tawerna Rybaki Gdansk Old Town
Now, I’m not the world’s most cynical guy … but, come the day, there I was, extremely tired after my early-morning flight, standing in this beautiful, aged-like-a-fine-wine street in Gdansk’s Old Town, having just been deposited by an airport taxi, the driver of which confessed that even using his sat-nav, he was having trouble locating the address that I had given him ~ the address of my lovely apartment.
Let me reiterate the name of that apartment and the apartment’s address in case you have missed my previous references:
Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary! Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland
There I stood with my laptop case in hand, a weary traveller in Old Town Gdansk.
And a more enchanting, bohemian street you could not wish to be standing in. Now, all that was needed was to find your room, deposit your case, freshen up and sightsee until you drop. Little did I know that I would walk … and walk … and walk, but devoid of all enjoyment, and by the end of the day I would be more than ready to drop.
Not comfortable still ~ I am a pragmatic pessimist ~ I strolled slowly up the street peering at the property numbers, more than certain that I would not find the apartment I was looking for. And would you Adam and Eve it, there was a 7/8, and next to it an 11/12, but as for 9/10 it was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they forgot to rebuild it after Hitler blew it up?
I will not say that I did not believe it. I did believe it, but wished to be proven wrong. I walked that same stretch of street three times, as though by doing so the missing numbers would miraculously make themselves known to me, but no such luck and more of the same eventually had me pop inside a café and ask the people therein if they knew the mysterious whereabouts of mislaid numbers 9 to10.
Nice people but no idea. They suggested I try the alley next door.
This little street fanned out into a wide rectangle with flats on either side, but number 9/10 was not among them. I walked to the end of the street and back again, but, as the song goes, on completion of this exercise ‘I still hadn’t found what I was looking for’.
Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary! Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland
I retraced my steps, peered up and down the street that traversed the one I was walking, and then, none the wiser, returned to the café where I had asked directions before.
It may strike you as strange, but the café people did not know any more than they did 20 minutes previously.
Over another coffee, I tried to telephone the apartment which did not exist and whose owners never reply to their customers, but my O2 roaming was roaming somewhere else, and the café had no wireless internet with which to connect my laptop. As I said earlier, we expect too much; this is the age of communication. Now, had there been a telephone box …
But this would not have helped either. Four or five streets later (I had begun looking for alternative accommodation), somehow I manged to make a phone call, but the number for apartment Twanky Wanky returned the message, ‘unrecognised’. So, their email is unmanned, and their phone number is a false one.
Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary! Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland
By now, I had drunk three more coffees in as many cafes, none of which had wireless internet, neither customer toilets, and this, the latter, let me tell you, is a real problem in Zloty land: public loos are few and far between and when you do eventually find one, if indeed you do, you either pay up or pee yourself.
As I trudged moodily through the very streets that I thought I would enjoy, my laptop bag crammed with presents, which made it all the heavier, I wondered if I was the victim of a cynical and sadistic trick that had me following signs to the loo only to be taken around and around in circles. Perhaps the loo signs were Booking.com sponsored and soon I would come to FAQs?
As luck would have it, I remembered the subterranean bogs on the little side street where I was told Twinky Winky apartment might be, so I detoured back there, disturbed the female bog attendant who was sucking on a fag (ah, hem), gratefully used the loo and upon emerging from it, happened to cast a glance into a gated compound, and guess what it was I saw there locked away and hidden? Yes, you’ve got it right: the elusive numbers 9/10. This astonishing discovery, as elucidating as it was, mattered not a jot, since I neither had the code which would allow me to access the gated compound or the code for the door of the property.
F.ck! F.ck! F.ck!
All I wanted now was to find a hotel, dump my case and secure a room for the night. I was exhausted; bear in mind that I had been up since 4am and had undergone the cattle-market of travelling discount airways.
I wanted a hotel desperately, but I was not prepared to pay silly money, even in my beleaguered state.
Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary! Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland
A young lady in a bar (where else!) after telling me that I looked much younger than I was (I told her I used Buttocks.) offered to put me up for the night (I think that’s what she said?) for nothing. But as I am rather fussy about who it is I get mugged by, I politely declined her offer, and me and my trusty laptop took to the streets again.
In another bar, I met a young lady (I don’t make a habit of this … Trust me, I’m an antique dealer), who would have been speaking perfect English if she could lose her American accent. She sympathised with my plight. “Have you been had?” she asked. “Well, not recently and not as much I’d like,” I Frankie Howard replied (for the edification of deprived millennials, Frankie was a camp comedian). She then asked me where I was going, and when I replied Kaliningrad, an ominous hush fell over the bar. She then treated me to a diatribe about Russia and the Russians, before admitting that she wasn’t too fond of most of western Europe either, and couldn’t stand the globalists. But she had been drinking all night long and had the very English female habit of saying F.ck! a lot.
Having enjoyed my brief encounter with Miss F.ckalot, off I trudged, completely in the wrong direction to the one in which I wanted to go, but with the applaudable compensation that I ended up on the historic side of the river.
The sky was a complementary blue and the air crisp with the first flirtation of spring. As tired as I was, I made time to make love to the scenery. I even unzipped my camera. But I shied away from the top-price hotels with their fancy names and liveried doormen.
There are very few places in the world as distressing as the immediate area that borders Gdansk’s bus station, and it was quite far on foot for a senior citizen who had already spent two hours plodding the cobbled pavements to drag himself to, but I reckoned that close to the bus station there must be a cheap hotel.
I reckoned wrong. There wasn’t. At least a visible one.
I stopped and asked a taxi driver if he knew of a budget hotel? He didn’t. Why should he? He was only a taxi driver. In the golden age of communication an impediment indeed.
I walked and walked, and based on the same hypothesis that travel stations were associated with hotels, ended up at the city’s central railway station. Here, as everywhere else, there was no hotel in sight. But then it happened. The man up there answered my prayers, either that or it pays to advertise. Lit up, like a beacon of hope, white, bright, refulgent and gloriously unmissable, it could have been a mirage but thankfully was not. Two simple but adorable words on top of a high-rise building: here is the ‘Mercure Hotel’, they said.
With blisters on my feet and soul, I hopped into the nearest taxi and dismissing as a fait accompli the taxi driver ripping me off, 10 Euros for a four-minute trip, I asked the delightful man, whom my feet regarded as their saviour, to part the waters of my discontent and take me to the Mercure.
Could it have been the height of the Mercure or its grand, perpetual revolving door that made me think ‘too costly’? This we will never know. But I went in all the same. Went in! I actually just went in! I didn’t need a door code? All I had to do was walk through the open door — the revolving door that never closes — and there was a reception desk and someone there to talk to! Don’t you just love a proper hotel?! Asking the price of a room for a man dead on his feet, the reply came back ‘sixty quid’. Good enough! Job done!
Yes, the electronic door card did not work the lift the first time I tried to use it, no matter how I waggled it! Yes, the toilets were also electronic door-card operated. Yes, the lighting system in the hotel room only came on if one shoved the card in the reader attached to the wall. And yes, wasn’t it all, in spite of this, wasn’t it all so lovely!
My stay at the Mercure, which I would like to write about later, was a blessing and would have been no less so had I not been led a merry dance by the owners of an apartment in Poland, which might have been just the ticket if, after I had paid the tariff, they had simply provided the codes I needed to get me through the door.
Pay heed to my experience. It is a warning to the unwary.
It was bad enough as it was, but imagine how worse it could have been had I not been travelling light! I only had a laptop case, not a 35kg bag!
The moral of this story is, if you are going to run the risk of booking an apartment room instead of a proper hotel, ie a place which has a front desk with staff that you can talk to, make sure you get your key code early. Otherwise, take a burglar with you, a ladder and a battering ram.
Think this is a joke? It’s not so funny when it happens to you!
Tawerna Rybaki Old Town Gdansk a Warning to the Unwary! Piwna 9/10, Srodmiescie, Gdańsk, 80-831, Poland
NOTE> Booking.com: Once I had alerted Booking.com to my plight, they were quick to respond to me and quick to issue a refund for the booking, which included the difference between the price of the non-accessible apartment and the cost of a night at Mercure Hotel. I am grateful to them for this.
Updated: 29 September 2023 ~ How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK
Airspace Closures
Russia has closed its airspace to airlines from multiple countries in direct response to airspace closures effecting its airlines, which were introduced by western governments opposing Russia’s military operation to ‘demilitarise and de-Nazify’ Ukraine. Airlines on the banned list are prohibited from landing in or flying over Russian territory. As a result, air travel disruptions are widespread. If you intend to travel in the immediate future, you should contact your airline or travel agent for further information. Links to Airport/Airlines websites can be found at the end of this guide
Coronavirus
Please note that due to the ongoing situation with coronavirus, you are advised to check the travel restrictions for each of the countries referred to in this guide, including any exit requirements that may be in force within the UK.
See: Airlines/Airports Websites at the end of this post
How to Get to Kaliningrad from UK
Most people travelling from the UK to Kaliningrad are not
going to do so by car, train, taxi, bicycle or hitching. Some of you might, but
most of you won’t. You’ll want to come by plane, so that’s what I will focus on
here.
Flights from the UK to Kaliningrad
As far as I am aware, there are no direct flights from the UK to Kaliningrad, and there has not been for some time.
The last time I flew back from Kaliningrad to London direct was many years ago. I remember it well, as I sat in the front of the plane looking through the open door to the flight deck. The date was 10 September 2001. It was most probably the last day that you would be able to do that on an international airliner.
As far as I am aware, the only ‘convenient’ way to fly to Kaliningrad from Europe is to fly to Turkey and then change for Kaliningrad. If you aren’t in the market for paying between £400-£800 pounds, then I wouldn’t bother.
If you do fly to Kaliningrad, you will land at Khrabrovo Airport. Once a relatively small red-brick building dating from the Königsberg era with a high wire fence, today Khrabrovo Airport is a modern terminal possessing all the usual facilities.
From Khrabrovo Airport to Kaliningrad
The distance from Khrabrovo Airport to Kaliningrad central is about 20km.
The easiest way of getting to Kaliningrad is by taxi. Look for the cubicles by the airport terminal exit, which offer taxi services. The fare to the centre of Kaliningrad typically costs between 700 and 900 roubles (approx. £5.87~ £7.55).
The cheaper option is to travel by bus ~ fare 50 roubles (0.42 pence). Take either route 144 or 244-Э. Payment is made on the bus, either to the driver or a conductor. Buses run frequently, about every 40 minutes, between 9.00am and 9.00pm (Link to Bus Timetable). The journey to Kaliningrad’s Yuzhniy Bus Station takes approximately 45 minutes.
Kaliningrad via Gdansk, Poland
(Photo credit: Serhiy Lvivsky)
The route that most of us take when travelling to Kaliningrad is to fly by Wizz Airlines from Luton London Airport to Gdansk and then travel from Gdansk to Kaliningrad.
Time was once that I would take a pre-booked taxi from Gdansk Airport to Kaliningrad. If you had contacts in Kaliningrad, which I had, someone could arrange this for you. In 2022, I was told that the journey to Kaliningrad from Gdansk Airport would cost you in the region of £348. This was a gigantic leap in price from the 100 quid that I was paying back in 2019. Why? Could the price hike be associated with border-crossing difficulties emanating from coronavirus restrictions, a by-product of western sanctions or just plain old profiteering? Whatever the explanation, rumour has it that the taxi option is no longer viable. Even if you like spending money, Poland is no longer accepting vehicles with Russian number plates crossing from Kaliningrad into Poland (now, where’s my screwdriver!) (Link to article on Poland’s extraordinary measures. It also mentions a ‘big wall’, so you won’t go climbing over that, will you, with or without licence plates! So there!)
Bussing it from Gdansk to Kaliningrad
I have travelled by bus to and from Kaliningrad via Gdansk three times now.
To do this, you must first take a taxi from Gdansk Airport to Gdansk Bus Station, located at 3 Maja St 12. There are plenty of taxis at the airport rank, and the cost of the trip is about 87 zloty (£16).
The bus ticket from Gdansk costs 178 zloty (approximately £31). There are 3 buses a day from Gdansk Bus Station, and the last bus leaves at 5.00pm. The approximate travel time is advertised at 4hrs and 20mins, but in reality it often takes longer than this, due to the grilling you get at both borders, especially since the Polish border authorities introduced the practice of photographing everyone on board: Smile please, we are going to make crossing into Kaliningrad extremely irritating for you. It will be inside leg measurements next!
Catching the bus means buying tickets online in advance. By far the most straightforward and therefore best online booking service is Busfor.pl
Example of Busfor’s Gdansk to Kaliningrad page below:
There was a time when the bay from which the Gdansk>Kaliningrad bus service operated was Gdansk’s best kept secret. You could try asking at the bus information office, but if they had that information they would not be letting you have it. Thankfully, it is not necessary to resort to such enigma now, as a printed piece of paper stuck on the inside of the bus station wall states that the bus to Kaliningrad leaves from bay 11.
Bay 11 is not exactly a bay, it is a sign sticking out of the wall at the back-side of the bus station with the figure ’11’ chalked across it. But this is good enough.
The facilities at Gdansk Bus Station are bog standard. It does have a bog (It will cost you 4 zloty for a pee.), but the metal tins that used to function as a left-luggage department have disappeared TARDIS-fashion, and the Bus Station cafe, which was basic but useful, as there are no other cafes nearby, has closed.
At the time of writing, you will have approximately two hours to kill if you catch, for example, the morning flight from London Luton Airport to Gdansk in time to catch the 3.00pm bus. My advice is take a walk into Gdansk Old Town for great cafes and an historic atmosphere.
The buses dock at Kaliningrad’s Central Bus Station in the vicinity of the city’s South Railway Station. Change here for local buses, coaches to Svetlogorsk/Zelenogradsk coastal resorts and taxi services.
Kaliningrad Gdansk London Luton Tips for Survival An account of the first time I travelled by bus from Kaliningrad to Gdansk Airport and the return journey from the UK to Kaliningrad, again using the bus option.
Kaliningrad via Vilnius, Lithuania
Is it still possible to take a train from Vilnius to Kaliningrad? A good question, and one to which I have found no definitive answer. Most articles and train booking sites on the net are either keeping shtum about this or are acting rather cagey. I tried to ‘book a ticket’ online using four different hypothetical days on which to travel, only to be told each time that ‘there are no trains running on this day’.
Years ago we used to fly to Vilnius (www.ryanair.com), stay overnight in one of the hotels there and then catch a train either the next day or the day after to Kaliningrad. This is because Vilnius is a wonderfully historic city with great bars, and we were young(ish), in love and courting (‘courting’, it sounds so quaintly British don’t you think!).
The trains that pass through Vilnius on their way to Kaliningrad are long-distance trains returning from Moscow. The train journey is a bit of a plodder, taking about 6 to 7 hours in total. Passengers can travel economy class but by far the most civilised way is to pay for a compartment. Each compartment holds four people. For economy purposes, you can purchase one ticket and share the compartment; for privacy, you pay for the whole compartment.
It never was easy to purchase a ticket in advance for this journey, ie online, but you can try (www.litrail.lt/keleiviams😮[Sorry, silly sanction block] ) (www.vilnius-tourism.lt/en/information/arrival/by-train/). We used to purchase the ticket at Vilnius Railway Station itself on the day of travel or the day before. If we ever got stuck, we would use the bus service . Vilnius Bus Station is conveniently located next to Vilnius Railway Station.
From Vilnius by train you will arrive at Kaliningrad’s South Railway Station, a superb restoration of the Königsberg original on the outside and inside revamped but tastefully.
Taxis can be found on the station’s concourse and buses are available from the adjacent Central Bus Station. Turn right when you exit the main entrance, and you will find the bus station in easy walking distance.
