Bankerhan Hotel

Super friendly staff with a cozy hotel room! Zeynep is very professional and always willing to help! Everything is super clean and breakfast is homemade and comprises of a delicious buffet. Location is great as well in proximity to Galata tower!

Great location, but overall a mediocre experience. The good: perfect location to explore Galata and Karaköy or pick up the tram, friendly staff, solid breakfast spread, decent view from the higher floors The not-so-good: cleanliness (floor in my room had that gritty dirty feeling), a non-working showerhead, air-conditioning option was not enabled on my thermostat so I had to choose between either a very warm room or street noise and smells from an open window. Also, as other reviewers have mentioned / as is fairly clear from photos online, the bathrooms only separated with a lightly frosted glass partition and in my particular room the door was not even frosted - something to keep in mind if privacy is a concern.

Upon booking you will receive an awkwardly-worded email stating that you have to pay for your whole stay in cash at check-in and that if you want a pickup from the airport it costs 60 Euro (Uber costs 30). After telling them that we would stay somewhere else because we don’t have 500+ Euro in cash to throw around, they said that they would accept card. They also eventually allowed us to pay less than 30 Euro (in card) for an airport drop-off (less than half of what they initially said it would cost). Unfortunately, like much of Turkey, they will unapologetically attempt to take advantage of you and you have to negotiate for everything. The hotel itself is around decent, but is not 4 stars. The breakfast spread is good, including 3 types of olives if you’re into that. The rooms are not great. We paid extra for a slightly larger room, which was very tiny. The Japanese style room means it’s just a bed on the floor in a studio. The door to the bathroom was wide open at the top, allowing for no privacy. Multiple things were broken. The fridge was moldy. We also suffered a number of spider bites.