Over the May bank holiday I hired a car along with my sister and boyfriend and we traveled along part of the west coast of Ireland. We hadn't booked accomodation on the Saturday night, and so when we were about 1 1/2 hours out of Cliften looked up this hostel in the Lonely Planet and called ahead to see if they had any vacancies. I was told that they did so we headed there. When we turned up we were greeted by an older man who was all very chummy and friendly, but we said that we wanted to see the dorm rooms and find out the prices before accepting them. He gave us the keys to an 8 bed dorm, or said that we could have the 4 bed dorm, but we would have to pay for the extra bed in the room. I asked what would happen if we didn't want to take the last bed and were happy to have someone else in the room and he refused to even answer!
We went upstairs, but the rooms were very basic and without any character and the bathrooms weren't ensuite. We decided that it wasn't worth it, especially if we would have to pay €80 for the 4 bed dorm(!) so we went back downstairs and said, "sorry but we're going to leave it, it's not what we were expecting." Well the chummy old man turned and started saying that we'd done "pretty much the worst thing we possibly could, ringing ahead and booking 4(!!!) hours in advance and then cancelling on him...etc... rant... etc..." I could understand his stance if I'd booked ahead and his hostel was full and he had to turn away other bookings, but I only called him 90minutes prior to arriving, the hostel was half empty and we didn't even discuss price when I called, let alone confirm a booking. He chased us out the door, yelling at us to keep going and that we should go find a 5 star hotel somewhere.
Not the way to win customers.