Bed & Breakfast Jarvis House of Downtown Toronto

I have very mixed feelings about this place. We had a great deal of difficulty lining up budget accommodations in the placed featured in guide books (I had not understood before I arrived that what we celebrate as Columbus Day in the US is the Canadian Thanksgiving), so I took a chance on this place despite the unpleasant one-​star review above. My bottom line reaction is that this is a budget accommodation and, for a budget accommodation, it is OK although not great. You have to know what you are getting into.
Physically, this place is a bit faded. Narrow unpleasant corridors, unpainted sections on some walls, cracks in the sink. The rooms vary greatly in size — we were told that the room we had reserved was small, and when we looked it was, but we were offered a much larger room and we took it. Our room itself was fine, the bed was comfortable, although the bathroom was poorly stocked with no shampoo (I always travel with some, just in case) and the bar of soap was minuscule. The hotel’s web site site advertised that even the front rooms facing Jarvis Street are noise-​free because of the way the windows are made — this was decidedly not the case, but the weekend noise at least did not bother us.
The room comes with a full breakfast, served in somewhat cramped room in the lower level — the host makes eggs in the manner of a guest’s choice, along with some fresh fruit and two strips of bacon. There are also two kinds of bread that can be toasted, and cold cereal with milk. Breakfast was a mixed bag like everything else — if you use the toaster and the machine for heating water of tea at the same time, a fuse blows. And on the second day of our stay the hotel ran out of milk (only half way through the breakfast period) and although our host said she could go out to get more milk it sounded as if it would take sometime, so we passed. The computer provided for guests prints out in the host’s sitting area, and in any event the computer was unusable because the shelf that holds the keyboard and mouse was stuck inside the table; and the computer was so old that there was, apparently, no bus port of the front end. But showing the other side of this place, the host then took the thumb drive onto which I had downloaded the PDF of my boarding pass the night before and went to her own home nearby to print it out.

If you’re a little person or a fan of getting ripped off, then this is the European-​style hostel for you. Upon arrival, I was informed that the room with a normal human-​sized bed I booked wasn’t available, but my girlfriend and I were expected to climb 4 flights of stairs to a cramped, former attic-​space room with furnishings from the Late-​Garage Sale Leftovers Era and 2 tiny twin beds. Being a tall, broad man, I informed the innkeeper that we would not be staying one night in the establishment, since no reasonable accomidation was offered. The slumlord seemed to understand that I couldn’t spend my short stay in a tiny room with tiny beds, so I thought our business was done.
I discovered the next day that my credit card had been charged the full 3 night rental rate. I returned to Jarvis to confront the innkeeper, where I was informed that the charges would not be reversed, but the room had been rented out in our absence. So, not only did the odd woman get my money, but she suckered someone else into the same trap and received their money, too. If it was about lost revenue, I would have received 2 nights’ worth of a refund. It’s about ripping people off. DO NOT FALL VICTIM TO THIS SCAM.