A Spooky Day in Plovdiv

I'm not really all that far from Transylvania here in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Eastern Europe has a certain sense of place...

I arrived in Plovdiv the day before yesterday, and booked into the hotel ranked number one by Rough Guides. Hotel Hebros has in the past been widely recommended elsewhere as well. Its restaurant was chosen the best in Bulgaria for two years running. Nevertheless, my visit seemed to present a very different story.

I am sure it was once a very nice hotel, and the décor is still nice—though not, if you look closely, very high quality. But I do not think it is any longer the hotel it was. In fact, I am not entirely sure it is really a hotel any more.

Here's what I discovered, when I booked in:

1, The room rate is at least 30% over that quoted in the guides—now 139 euros. This happens, of course. Not necessarily sinister. Though quite a jump in one year...a year of recession...especially, with swine flu, in the travel business...

2. I seemed to be the only guest. In peak season, on a Friday night, during the Plovdiv Folklore Festival. Other hotels seemed to be full or close to full. This was downright eerie, especially given the top billing Hebros is given by all the big-name guides. Even eerier was the fact that

3. There was nobody at the front desk. Nobody when I arrived, and nobody for six or seven hours of periodic checking. I did get checked in; once I rang the front door bell, a woman appeared from the restaurant outside and showed me to my room.

4. The check-in procedure was very strange. She did not ask for a name; she just took my passport and ushered me to a room, saying they had been expecting me. This was creepy to the max, and suggested they were not anticipating any other guests.

5. To make things worse, the woman who checked me in did not return my passport. She disappeared with it. This was especially troublesome because it is actually illegal to be on the streets of Bulgaria without some form of official ID. I was then trapped in the hotel, for some hours, in a strange city, with no services, no sources of information, and no apparent way of contacting hotel staff.

Visions of Count Dracula began to dance in my head. I half-expected the grand piano in the hall outside my room to start playing by itself.

Wanting food, water, and Internet, and with no apparently relevant buttons on the in-room phone—and no answer to dialling zero--I eventually went down to the lobby and tried to ring the bell on the lobby desk. Interesting—-it did not ring. It had apparently been welded shut. I tapped it with my fingernails to get it to make a reasonably loud sound. Repeated attempts--nothing. Then I thought to ring the doorbell; from the inside; hoping it would attract someone relevant from the restaurant. It had worked, after all, when I checked in. But this time even that did not work. Obviously, then they were expecting someone—I had a reservation. Now, they were not.

Not knowing what else to try, I repeated the exercise perhaps four times, at long intervals. Maybe twenty minutes passed.

Finally an old man in the street outside seemed to take an interest. He made some sort of gesture and disappeared into the restaurant. He returned with a woman, who entered the lobby. She was not the same woman who had checked me in. I explained to her my problem with the passport, which she did not have. She in turn seized the opportunity to ask me to pay in advance. She said this was necessary because there would be nobody on the front desk the next morning who knew how to take payment.

This concern revealed three things: 1) they had no trained desk staff, 2) they assumed nobody would stay in the hotel for more than one night, and 3) they had never actually looked at my reservation. It was for ten days. Had they even possibly mistaken me for someone else? Is Hitchcock going to show up here as a cameo?

This raised a new problem, because I was expecting the reduced rate for an extended stay promised on their website—a rate reduction of 40%. I figured I’d better confirm this immediately.

No—this seemed to be a problem. The woman pulled a notebook computer over to me and insisted I go on the internet and show my reservation to her, to confirm the rate.

Odd that she would not know what was on the hotel web page, and odd that she would want the guest to do this for her. She seemed, in fact, to be threatening or challenging me. It looked very much as though there was going to be a problem with the stated rate…

At this point, I had decided the best thing was to move on—-it was not worth the hassle. I told her so, in not immoderate terms, but I expressed my concern at the apparent hostility to guests and lack of professionalism. I mentioned that I was a travel writer, and would obviously not be able to give them a good recommendation should I write the experience up.

Believe it or not, my decision to leave made my problems worse. This was apparently not okay at all; as if I had now offended somebody's honour. The woman made no concilatory noises, but said something like “oh-oh” under her breath, and asked me to return to my room, and she would bring the passport to me.

I returned to my room, and waited. After perhaps another twenty minutes, a knock on the door. Instead of the woman, it was a quite burly man, with my passport visible in one fist, but a credit-card reader in the other. He said he would not give me back my passport unless I let him swipe my credit card.

Uh-oh indeed. Okay, getting scary now. At best, he seemed to be insisting I pay a day rate before he would let me leave. At worst, I was giving out my credit card information to an establishment that seemed not to be on the level. Not one to take well to being bullied, I told him if he did not give me back my passport, I would have to phone the police. I asked him for their number. He refused it, and said he was going to phone the police himself.

Which he then did. I phoned them too, but not speaking Bulgarian, had no way of actually communicating the problem to them. Hopeless; I had to hang up the phone.

Next, I packed up my things with all deliberate speed, figuring if I could not get my passport from this guy, my best bet was to get myself to the closest nearby hotel, hope the owner's name was not Bates, and throw myself on their mercies. I needed someone who spoke Bulgarian to act as my translator with the police, in order to get my passport back, and thought the lure of my patronage for ten nights might make it worth their while. If I stayed put, though, I figured this tough guy, who presumably was the manager on duty, might claim I was refusing to leave, or even stall, then claim the next day I had been refusing to pay the bill for a night's lodging. I was also feeling pretty trapped by now. And possibly vulnerable to a bogus criminal charge.

When I emerged into the street—the hotel still apparently completely deserted--the police had already arrived, and were discussing the case with our friend the muscle. Of course, understanding only Bulgarian, they heard only his side, and heaven knows what he told them. But fortunately, my passport, which the police examined very closely, showed clearly I could not possibly have slept in the hotel for even a night, as I had just arrived in the country. Probably very lucky for me.

The muscle sent somebody up to check out the room, and made a fuss about a coke and a water from the mini-bar. I had drunk them, as they were cold, but then replaced them from my own supplies, as his informant must have known. But I did not want to give him a chance at a red herring, in the circumstances. So I paid for that on the spot. He also demanded that I pay for cleaning the room, which I had not slept in; I refused to do so. I doubted he could have made that stick with the cops, were they able to understand what he was saying to me--they could read the date in the passport. After much apparent inactivity, which I took to be the process of filling in a report, the police seemed to give him a mild lecture in front of me—hard to say when you can’t understand Bulgarian--handed me my passport, and waved me off. I got the sense the police themselves were unsure of their ground with this fellow, and he seemed to be swaggering a bit at them as well as me. If nothing else, he was a born bully, and obviously not suited by temperament to be working in a hotel.

I felt as though I had had the last word, for whatever that was worth, but was also left by now lugging my backpack and two smaller pieces of luggage around the steep and uneven streets of Old Plovdiv, an overweight man of 56, at about 9:30 pm, in search of a room for the night, during a heat wave. In high season, on a weekend, during the Festival. And having been on the road from Athens for over a day. Not a situation any tourist wants to unexpectedly find himself in, and it seems to me worth warning the travelling public that such things can happen here in Plovdiv. The first three hotels I checked were either full or took advantage of my obvious plight to ask a patently dishonest rate—as in, one thousand euros per night for a single at a very two-star-looking hotel—but the desk clerk at the Dali Art Hotel, bless his heart, although that hotel was also full, voluntarily got on the phone and found me a good room at a good price at the Saga Palace Hotel across town, then called a cab for me. All this without being asked, and without hearing any kind of sob story from me—just at seeing an old fat guy in his lobby with a heavy backpack
.

I would like the Dali to get credit for this, at least as much as I'd like to warn people against the current owners of the Hebros.

Through this random last minute method, I actually ended up with a pretty comparable room, in terms of actual facilities, if not décor—unless perhaps you fancy, as I do, glued, framed jigsaw puzzles on your walls?--in a pretty comparable location in relation to the sights, and a much better one in terms of street life and shopping, for a little over one fifth the price posted at the Hebros. All this, and actual service too. Even smiles.

The Saga Palace Hotel, in short, seems patently a better value, regardless of anything else, than the Hebros, even though essentially found at random.

It is sheer speculation, but I know something of the hotel business, and have a guess at what has happened to the Hebros. The same thing has happened to many hotels even in Canada, where organized crime is much less of a problem than in the Balkans.

My hunch is that its great reputation—not just the hotel, but the restaurant--made it overwhelmingly attractive to local individuals lacking just that particular commodity. It may serve as a respectable front for laundering large sums of money the provenance of which might otherwise be awkward to explain. The restaurant, which I did not have the opportunity to sample, may well still be legit—harder to disguise that, since locals probably patronize it. But a hotel that reports itself as always full can claim a lot of revenue; so long as real guests do not too often foul up the accounting.

Then again, they might have just been out for blood...