thestudenthotel.com Reviews 

My experience with TSH has been awful. In April I booked a space in a double room in Bologna for my son for the Sep22-Jan23 semester. I was assured, over the phone, I could cancel the reservation up to 14 days before check-in. Following the Summer session, my son decided not to return to University in September. At the beginning of July I contacted Reservations and it was impossible to speak to anyone, either in Bologna or in the head office in Amsterdam. I sent an email explaining the situation and was informed I could have cancelled only in the 14 days after the booking was made. Clearly, for this type of booking, this option is pointless! So I now have to pay a penalty in excess of €2,000 (3 full months of the 5 month stay!!!) although they are fully booked for the semester and have a waiting list, nearly 2 months before semester starts!! I was informed I could reduce the penalty to €350 if I find someone to take over the booking which I am now spending hours trying to do through social media. The option of them assigning the room to someone on the waiting list with me paying the penalty is apparently not possible. I am shocked and disgusted at what is a true SCAM making money off honest people by adopting confusing and unreasonable cancellation policies. While the booking is nearly 2 months away and the company would incur no losses by simply making the room available on their website, while also taking a more reasonable cancellation fee from me, they apparently intend to go ahead with this “legalised” THEFT! TSH portray themselves as a student friendly, modern company but their customer service and policies are appalling!

I would need many hours to describe the nightmare that it was to spend 5 months in TSH Vienna, but I have no energy for that since I lost all my patience with everything related to this place. Still, here I enumerate a few (there are at least a bunch more than what I'll describe...):
1- Unprepared staff: no one knows what they are doing and each person gives different and wrong(!) information about whatever topic you ask them = meaning there's simply no centrally coordinated information about the services, or do's and don'ts and the staff is not trained at all. Furthermore, they assume they are your good friend and write you via Whatsapp (another privacy issue with legal consequences), forgetting that they are actually providing you a service and that they MUST be professional about it.
2- Rules are changing constantly: this would even be a reason for a legal process. After you sign the contract, they change the rules and you're basically obliged to follow them.
3- No privacy in your own room: since this is a hotel, they assume they can simply enter your room whenever they want to, WITHOUT prior notice. No, you can not lock your room from inside! Any staff (basically all of them) with the card can come in. And here I describe it as a CONSTANT inconvenience that happened to me, not once, not twice but five times! And all of this after having complained enough (again information is not properly distributed and the problem kept happening).
...and just so many more.

Please don't waste your money, time, patience, peace of mind, staying there for whatever reason. Unless you're a teenager starting university (yes, it has the mood&mess of an erasmus-student-dormitory ) and you don't care about the described (and many more) problems.

DO NOT RELY ON THE COVID CANCELLATION POLICY published by this company which at the time of booking allows (in writing) cancellation to be made upto 1 week before the check-in date if there is a travel ban in effect and you are unable to travel.

I had a booking at the Amsterdam West location (booked 15th January 2021) to start yesterday, but the Dutch imposed a flight and docking ban on all but the most limited arrivals from the UK (and other countries) as of the 23rd January 2021, exceptions to which do not apply to student (whether postgraduate or undergraduate) travel with tests nor otherwise. This has not been lifted, and the day before the deadline for cancellation, I sent a cancellation notice to the company as it was clear I would not be able to travel.

TSH has not only refused to honour this clearly published policy and indeed a contractual term - but the Agent in question ('Eleri') has actually tried to lie about the terms of the COVID Cancellation claiming that it requires a postponement and can only be cancelled once only three months of the original booking end-date remains. Anyone may review the COVID terms on their website and see these falsely claimed terms do not reflect the policy. When challenged, and a copy of this magically invented new policy requested with reference to these terms, the same Agent was incapable and unwilling to produce a copy of the policy she/he claimed existed.

Indeed, when asked to give in writing reason as to why this travel ban does not fall within the policy, the same agent was either unwilling (or from the general service quality perhaps unable) to do so.

The customer service of this company is quite awful, and the agent is clearly undertrained with an incredibly bad attitude.

Whilst this is morally tantamount to theft as is a clear attempt to retain deposit money given the cost of litigating over a sum of a few hundred - others need not be taken unaware. There are business out there which will not behave in such a way and actually employ Customer Service staff who have the most basic of training.

I would never even consider booking with this Hotel ever again.

Our flights were cancelled to Amsterdam due to Covid 19 and therefore we were unable to make our trip. I gave Booking.com 2 months notice and the hotel so it was plenty of time to resolve this with The Student Hotel Amsterdam. Between them both they kept telling me to contact the other party (Booking.com or the Hotel -The Student Hotel Amsterdam) to resolve the booking query. In the end my booking expired and Booking.com advised that they no longer had any part in the booking and the Student Hotel Amsterdam advised that they would only offer us new dates in their hotel until Feb 2021 and not until the same time in August 2021 as per our request. The Hotel are now ignoring my emails. They have now been paid and we are left with nothing.