Cosmos Hotel, Chisinau, Moldova

We spent four nights at Cosmos Hotel in Chisinau, Moldova.
The hotel was originally a communist era tourist, business hotel, a large imposing tower-block.
The exterior of the building is not particularly inviting, but the smiling receptionists made our welcome warm.

Our room was at the rear of the hotel on the tenth floor, the rooms on that floor had recently been renovated. We had an average size room with a compact bathroom.
There were two single beds in our room, the mattresses were soft. I prefer a firmer mattress, my bed was uncomfortable and I didn’t get much sleep, but Richard said his bed was comfortable and he slept well. I think the mattresses were the original ones from when the hotel was built. A folded thin quilt had been placed on top of the mattress underneath the sheet, but this just made it more uncomfortable.

There was a large old fridge in our room, it was quite noisy, but it worked very well – our drinks were freezing cold.
Also in our room was a desk and chair, bedside unit and lamp, a fitted wardrobe, and there was a small balcony.
There was an old, small TV mounted high up on a wall bracket. There were quite a few satellite channels, some were English language.

The bathroom had a large shower-tray, but no shower curtain, which meant the bathroom got very wet when we showered.
The water was hot and the water pressure was good.
When we checked-in there were two tiny bars of soap, and two sachets of shampoo.
We had two small bath mats, two hand towels, and two bath towels.
The first day our room was cleaned we were given new soap and shampoo.
The subsequent days we were given used bars of soap, presumably from the rooms of guests who’d checked-out. Nasty!
The soap bars were so tiny when new, let alone once they’d been used, so it was hard to believe we’d been given leftovers. Needless to say we didn’t use the manky dirty soap.
The shampoo sachets were not replaced every day.
The bath towels we’d used, which we’re soaking wet, were not refreshed for clean ones either. The cleaner simply hung them on the wall hooks. The bathroom was very damp, so the towels didn’t dry. We used hand towels the second day of our stay, and these were not refreshed either.
So, during the whole of our four night stay, we had the same mouldy smelling, damp towels.
I guess we should have asked for clean towels, but for the price we were paying we expected fresh clean towels daily. Considering the cleaner tried to palm us off with manky bits of used soap, we didn’t see the point in asking for clean towels, as we thought we’d probably be given used ones anyway.
There was a small heated towel rail in the bathroom.
Worse than, no fresh towels, and used soap, was the soil pipe – it leaked, a small leak, but a nasty stench regularly filled our bathroom. The hotel obviously knew about the leak, because there were signs of a bad repair.

Breakfast was included in our room rate. It was a self-service buffet, in the first floor restaurant.
We’d read lots of reviews about Cosmos Hotel before we booked, and most of the negative ones mentioned the breakfast saying it was very bad.
It wasn’t good.
There were quite a lot of food choices, but it was all low quality. Very stale cheap white bread, stale black bread, and seriously cheap nasty instant coffee, which you had to make yourself.
The boiled eggs, and fresh tomatoes were about the only edible things. There was plain white rice, which was obviously not fresh as it contained lots of hard crunchy bits where it had been reheated for several days. The cooked vegetables, such as aubergine and courgette, probably would have been better if they’d been hot, instead of stone cold and shrivelled up.
The coffee was so nasty, that one morning after breakfast, we went down to the reception cafe and bought a couple of coffees. We asked for an espresso and a cappuccino. We received two instant coffees that weren’t much better than the coffee upstairs in the breakfast restaurant.

We thought the Cosmos Hotel was overpriced for a budget hotel. The recent renovations are no doubt a large improvement on the old look, but they haven’t been carried out very well. The finish on everything in our room was very shoddy, which is a false economy for the hotel.
The lifts were a nuisance. There were four lifts, but they all had problems. They took a really long time to arrive, sometimes as long as ten minutes, which would be understandable if the hotel was busy, but during our stay there were few guests.
Also one day I got stuck in one of the lifts, all be it temporarily. But it was not a pleasant experience, as the inner door slammed shut with such force that the whole lift was shaking and groaning, until Richard managed to get the door open and free me.

It’s not all negative, Cosmos Hotel is in a good location, right next door to a new shopping centre which has a decent supermarket in the basement, a short walk to the railway station, and within easy walking distance of the centre of town, and it has lots of good eating and drinking places nearby.
The air-conditioning in our room worked well, as did the free WiFi.
The receptionists are what makes the Cosmos Hotel a pleasant place to stay. They were professional, friendly, and always smiling.

If ever we were in Chisinau, Moldova again we would not stay at the Cosmos Hotel. It is too expensive for what you get, not good value for money at all.

Cosmos Hotel
2 Negruzzi
CHISINAU
MD-2001
MOLDOVA
Tel: +373 22 83-75-05