GH Sander Hotel

Hotel Sander is located in the downtown area of Guayaquil, a convenient location but not that easy to find by most foreigners. The façade of the building is so common, nothing spectacular. The security issues in Guayaquil are not top notched, the hotel management will close the door and pull the rolling metal door down after 11pm. If you come in later than that, you have to ring the bell to get the front desk person's attention, this person usually unfolds a mat and sleeps at the lobby. The lobby is not that spacious, if you have a group of 8 persons or more, the luggage may fill up the whole area, and it is not the best case scenario you may anticipate. The elevator is really tiny and small, just enough for one simple wheelchair, claustrophobic folks will definitely say no to this slow motion transport. Unless you are on a wheelchair, most people prefer to use the staircases. The room size is okay, not spacious, but good enough to move around. The beds are awful, the mattresses are pretty old and the metal stands are rusty. The bed sheets are clean but thin and worn out. The tiny bulky little 12” TV is up at the corner of the ceiling and securely anchored. Nobody should think of stealing this 25+ years old bulky antique CRT TV set. The brighter side is one do not have to worry it will fall on your head. I had to make several trips to the front desk to get a functional remote control device. One should really enjoy that TV after making some intensive exercise to walk up and down, and the good thing is you don’t really need a gym. This is the idea of 2 birds in 1 stone. The air conditioner is perfectly functional (you need one with the humidity in Guayaquil), the built-in feature is the noise. It reminds the tenants it is functional every 15 minutes. The air conditioner is located at the ear level when you lie down on your bed. No one can ignore its existence and functionality. They are good match with the TV set age wise. Another feature in the shower room is the faucet, it is installed at the edge of the ceiling. Unless you are 6’ tall, nobody should touch it or mess around with it. The water pressure is not strong, you should give yourself plenty of time for a tiny stream of water dripping down. I usually take a shower for 5-10mins but with this special featured faucet, 25 minutes minimum. The bathroom has no fans or vents for ventilations. The design of the hotel bathroom has a 2” slit opening at the ceiling and it is open to the hallway. For people with serious bowel movement problems, it is better to use the balcony than doing it in the bathroom, folks who wait for the elevator can hear every single bowel movement you have inside. The hotel itself does not have a restaurant. It has a Restaurante Sander right next to the hotel and it is run by vendors independently to provide simple meals like breakfast and lunch. It is more like a cafeteria, I tried it twice, decent. This is not a grand hotel, for a low budget hotel, what you pay is what you get, period.

The room for the price given was ok but I did not like the fact that they made me paid for a room with 24h hot water, and there was no hot water at all. When I reported this to the reception, they told me it's going to cost more to have another room with hot water (7$ more !). This was not what was told at the time of payment and they play on this advantage for getting you in. So I do not recommend at all this kind of hotel: not for the price, but for the primciple of seeing you as pigeons.

I have travel to Guayaquil in September 2009, one friend told me about this hotel in Guayaquil. It was very clean, the new rooms has hot water and fans for $12.00 per person i think this was very cheap. The rooms from $8.00 per person are ok but i prefer the new ones. The service was OK, the food not so good i prefer the restaurant of the Hotel Alexander who is next to the Sander hotel.

We stayed here one night in the room without air conditioning ($7-8), the room is OK to sleep over one night, however the shower you don't want to get in. The following 2 nights we stayed in the better room ($11) with what they call air conditioning - it''s just 2 ventilators instead of 1. There is no hot water, no matter if you asked them. The laundry service is not available, as they say on the web-site. Same problem with breakfast being included, as promised on the same not so updated web-site of the hotel and their advertising. On top of these small my annoying things, my friends bag full of toiletries got thrown away or stolen...hotel of course is not responsible and does not give a damn. Also, if you prefer to be in a quite place, this is not a place whatsoever - incredibly noisy. Overall, the better rooms are OK to stay, but be careful with what the web-site lists, check everything for yourself. Enjoy your travel.

For some reason there are few hostel/hostals in Guayaquil. We opted for Hotel Sander when the few hostels got bad reviews in Lonely Planet and Rough Guide. In order to save money, we opted for rooms without air conditioning. We paid about 7-8 dollars a person. The rooms did have a private bathrooms and television but the walls were COMPLETELY WHITE. In fact, everything was completely white! There was no character to these rooms whatsoever and felt very institutional. The breakfast place next door was terrible and I wish we had not listened to the hotel telling us to go there. In general, this hotel was fine but I would not go back. WARNING: After living in Quito for over 4 months now, you would think I would not be scared by the dangerous warnings about Guayaquil. However, we found Guayaquil to be much more dangerous than Quito. The Malecon is very safe, even at night because there is limited entry and armed guards. However, there is a huge problems with taxis in Guayaquil. After a night hiking up the beautiful 444 stairs of Las Peñas, we got 4 taxis to fit all of us. One group of my friends were robbed by their taxi driver and two armed gunmen who jumped into the taxi at a red light. The "secuestro express" turns out to not be all that uncommon for the yellow ("official") taxis in Guayaquil. They take you around to ATMS to get as much money as possible and then drop you off well outside of Guayaquil. My poor friends were very scared after being held hostage for 1.5 hours in the taxi and were ready to get back to our homes in Quito. We learned now that you should call and executive unmarked taxi in Guayaquil which is not true in Quito.