from both sides of the hotel. Bleak-looking hotel from the outside, however, it is quite comfortable. Although the bedroom was on the small side it was adequate. Excellent bathroom with a good supply of toiletries.

Breakfast choice was good and extras, such as poached eggs and omlettes were available.

Evening meals were good, if a little pricy.

Short review:

Fantastic location, but way overpriced. Staff are impersonal. Breakfast buffet was pretty good.

Long review (very):

First of all, let me say that this is the first time that I've ever felt moved to write an online review of a hotel, and I have stayed in a LOT of hotels. I'm a travelling IT consultant and I've spent about 45 weeks of every year for the past five years staying in hotels on business, so well over 200 individual stays; usually 3-4 nights each time. The hotels that I've stayed in have mostly been in mainland Europe but also in the US, South America and Asia; right across the board from a $7 per night guesthouse in India to a $1000 a night presidential suite in Cannes.

This wasn't my first experience staying in a Peruvian hotel either; my girlfriend is from Lima, I've been to Peru quite a few times and we've stayed together in hotels in Trujillo, Lima, Pisco, Ica, Huacachina, Nazca, Cusco, Aguas Calientes and Arequipa. In short, I think I'm fairly well qualified to give my opinion of the Libertador Puno. This trip was for pleasure rather than business, which probably does make me more critical because it was my own money being spent rather than my employer's, but none of my trips to Peru have been business ones anyway so I can quite objectively compare it against other hotels where I've stayed in Peru.

We booked our hotel in Puno via Cecilia from Go2peru.com, and this was our third choice. Our first choice had been the Casa Andina on Suasi Island, which we cancelled after I found out that the boat trip across the lake to get to the hotel was going to cost $700 return, the price of a transatlantic flight! Our second choice was the other Casa Andina in town, which sounded excellent and had a suite at $150 a night, but turned out to be fully booked at the last minute. Cecilia called us just as we were getting on the coach to Puno to inform us of this and offered us the Libertador instead. It was going to cost $180 a night which was a bit more than I was really willing to pay for a normal hotel (as opposed to the little cottage that we had been going to stay in on Suasi), but I really wanted to treat my girlfriend to a nice hotel suite after we arrived off the long coach trip from Arequipa, and we had stayed at the Libertador in Trujillo a few months before which was above average, so we agreed.

I've never gone through an agency before, and how I wish we had just turned it down and found somewhere else ourselves when we got there instead. The first thing that we found out when we arrived at the hotel was that we didn't have a suite like we thought we did, just a standard double room. After my girlfriend protested to them in Spanish that we had been promised a suite, they said that the suites were all taken so it wasn't even possible. To be fair it turned out later that this wasn't their mistake after all, just a mix up following the conversation that we had with Cecilia, who we were unable to contact when we tried to call her from the hotel. Anyhow, I had read the reviews of Libertador Puno here on TripAdvisor saying that the rooms there are really small and I really objected to paying $180 for a tiny room, especially in a country where hotels are generally pretty cheap and there are places with large double rooms for 1/3 of the price 10 minutes away by taxi, so I told them we'd find somewhere else instead.

They said it was too late for that because I had already paid the deposit earlier that day. This was the last thing I needed; I try to avoid confrontation at the best of times and we were both really tired after the 5 hour coach trip, as well as feeling dizzy from the altitude. I said I would just instruct my bank to reject the transaction, and we made to leave.

Then the duty manager lady appeared from out back, and said that we could have a suite after all, for no extra charge. She said that they would have to clean it first, which sounded fair enough, so we waited for half an hour drinking cups of coca tea in the lobby. Then a young guy called José appeared, and said that I'd have to pay the difference after all. I explained that we had just been told that we didn't have to pay any extra (the other lady had disappeared by then), but then he showed me a piece of paper showing what we were actually paying per night according to our reservation, which was something like $160, so I told him that I didn't mind making up the extra $20 a night to the agreed price. Then there were some taxes to pay for my girlfriend because she's Peruvian (no other hotel has ever asked us to do this, and we've stayed in dozens). What I didn't realise was that he had sneakily shown me a print-out of what Cecilia was paying them at agency rates, not what I was paying for the double which was already $188 a night as it turned out when I checked my email from Cecilia the next day. That brought it up to $208, although that wasn't the only unexpected price increase. I probably would have picked up on this if I hadn't been absolutely exhausted and disoriented.

Eventually we were given the key to our suite, quite dismissively I thought. No "sorry about the misunderstanding", "do you need some help with your bags?", or even "enjoy your stay", just "yeah, here's your room key" and then he went off to attend to something else without even telling us how to get to the room. We did find the reception staff to be pretty unfriendly over the course of our two night stay, something that I haven't found in any other hotel in Peru, including the large chains like Marriott in Lima where they were much more personable.

We got to our suite on the second floor, and at first I thought that they had given us a standard double after all. It consisted of two tiny rooms: one of them had a small two-seater sofa, a wooden chair and a table; and the other room had a small double bed with very little space to move around. Each room was about the same size as a standard single room in a European hotel. As other people have mentioned, the decor is very 70s. The one redeeming feature was that it had fantastic views over the lake. We didn't stay in the room for long, just showered in the spotless but small bathroom and went for a meal in town. Booked a trip to the islands for the next day for 45 soles ($14) each from a travel agency while we were there.

The next morning we went down to the breakfast buffet at 06:00 (a first for me!), which was decent. Continental, American, Peruvian, it was all there. Well, being an Englishman I suppose a full English breakfast would've gone down even better, but that's probably being too picky ;-) Our boat trip picked us up from the pier right outside the hotel at 07:30, and dropped us off there again at 17:00, which was very handy. The Uros islands were impressive to see and we had an absolutely amazing time on Taquile, would have stayed the second night there instead if we'd realised what it was going to be like beforehand.

We needed to quickly check our flight details late in the night on the second night and we thought that given the price that they charge for the rooms we would have free Internet access like most other places where we've stayed, but they wanted $5 to use the PCs in the business centre, and the reception staff wouldn't check it for us on their PC so we had to just pay it. I'm probably coming across as a bit of a cheapskate here complaining about $5, but bear in mind that at an Internet café in Puno this would've cost 25 centimos (about $0.08), and I'm getting used to my girlfriend's Peruvian way of thinking about places overcharging for stuff! She flatly refused to let me pay the $5 at first, until I pointed out that the alternative was missing our flight. We did order a couple of very reasonably priced and well made Pisco Sours to our room from the hotel bar that night too, 14 soles ($4.50) each with no room service charge, which I thought was very reasonable for a 5-star hotel. I'm becoming a bit of a Pisco Sour connoisseur, and these ones were amongst the best I've had in Peru.

Unfortunately our stay at the Libertador Puno ended on a sour note just as it had begun - when we went to check out they wanted another $91 in taxes due to my girlfriend being a Peruvian (apparently José had miscalculated), which I had no option but to pay, and then when I presented my KLM frequent flyer card to claim some airmiles they said that I couldn't do it because I had booked via an agency, even though there was a big sign on the desk listing all of the airlines that they were affiliated with, of which KLM was one (plus we had ended up paying more than the standard advertised rate for a suite, because of all the extra charges!). My girlfriend got into an argument with them about the taxes, and eventually the manager of the hotel was summoned, my girlfriend had a heated argument with him in very fast Spanish and I still have no idea what they were going on about, but I had to pay all the extras regardless.

Anyway, all in all it ended up costing me about $250 a night for a well-below-average suite, albeit in an amazing location. I would not recommend anybody to stay at this hotel simply because it's a complete rip-off, you would be much better off staying at one of the other TripAdvisor recommended hotels in Puno instead.

We stayed for two nights as part of a tour in July 2007. I found the hotel to be very nice. The rooms are pretty small, but very clean. The bathrooms are nice, clean and new. Great water pressure from the showers.

I was not feeling well during part of our stay; I'm not sure if it was the altitude or just general fatigue. So I didn't eat very much of the hotel's food. What I did have was very good. We didn't go for fine dining, so I can't comment on the high end food. But we had cheeseburgers one night that were really good; technically, cheeseburgers aren't even available in the restaurant, but we asked the waiter and he let us order off of the room service menu. The service in the restaurant was excellent. I wasn't very hungry so I didn't eat much of my meal, and the head waiter came over to make sure that the food was okay, and that I wasn't unhappy with how it was prepared.

Two of us used the oxygen service, and the concierge was very accommodating in helping us out. I also used the internet service to check email. They actually never even charged me for this (it was supposed to be a minimal charge for unlimited use during your stay).

The setting is stunning and the rooms have very large picture windows, so you can really enjoy the view of the lake. They also have a neat lookout deck. At night, we went up and could hear frogs, birds, fish jumping out of the water. It was beautiful and really peaceful.

I thought the experience was very good. I don't worry so much about small rooms because I didn't go to Peru to spend much time in my room anyway. The lobby and public areas were expansive and unique. There was free coca tea available all the time.

I would definitely visit this hotel again, although I don't know when I'll ever get back to Puno!

The hotel is very 70's but it is clean and nice and definitely the best place near Puno. The rooms are nice and the bathrooms very luxurious and clean. The restaurant has good prices, great service, and good food. If I go to Titicaca again I will stay here.