The hotel itself is quite nice, offers phenomenal bay view and has modern room designs.
However, I didn’t feel that I got good value for money, altough we got a free upgrade (bayside view) as we were staying +10 days.
Main reason is the inefficient and inflexible processes! Here some concrete examples which I would recommend management to really work on:
- I used the chat service daily, and was never really happy with it. First, its unpersonal (you never know who or what is writing to you). Second, the response times are bad (sometimes it took up to 5 ours until I got a response). Third, the quality of the responses is close to useless. Almost for every question you receive the answer “I need to check with management”. In most cases I got just a part of my question answered.
- Orders to the room: Since the hotel charges 35 USD service fee, for the value of which you can order food or spend it at the bar, we daily ordered something. 1. I wanted to have milk bottles (which were available at the gold coast restaurant for breakfast), however this worked on the first day only, and not the other days as its not part of the “standard” things that can be ordered. Why so complicated? People pay serious amount of money, why not just sent some one who brings bottles up! This is no rocket science. 2. If you want a order everyday, you have to order it daily! Why is it not possible to write a note and ensure your guests get what they need without having to tell you everyday? 3. we ordered the first day a avocado toast. The way you receive the food is in carton boxes, in a carton bag! The bread was sweaty (in the carton box, no wonder) and it didn‘t look appealing at all. Why not deliver it on normal plates and wash them? Save money, do something for the environment and the food tastes and looks better! I was shocked to receive all orders in carton boxes. We stopped after the second day. I would have prefered if the hotel would afford 3USD/d cheaper stays and not “force” the people to use their services as its anyway charged.
4. Accounting process: About 60% of the value I booked the hotel for were blocked 24h prior my arrival on the credit card. After my arrival, the accounting group reserved a daily amound of ~400USD on my card. If they did this daily, this would mean an „overbooking“ of ~70-80% on my card, compared to the real price. I went to the service desk, and asked them to adjust this value to real values as I planned to stay 1m in the US and I din‘t want to much money blocked on my credit card for no reason. That wasn‘t possible, but the staff managed to „stop“ the daily booking completely. Accounting problem solved. However this led to the next issue: Because of that, I couldn‘t reconnect to the wifi (“credit card information missing”), and I has to daily call the service desk, to open the wifi connection for me.
5. Breakfast at gold coast: My wife and me had on our first day breakfast at the gold coast restaurant. The food was good and choice was ok. We were very surprised to receive a bill of ~100USD for 2x buffet and 2 orange juices. The biggest surpirse on it was the 18% service charge on the overall price! For what? Its a buffet.. in my opinion far from fair pricing here..
6. At our arrival we encountered very unmmotivated employees which didn’t really explain us anything. The employee (Don’t want to mention the name..) didn’t even look at us but was starring at her laptop and doing other things. You expect this different in a hotel.
To mention a few good things in addition:
- Valet parking works very well and efficient (only scan a QR code and one click)!
- Pedro and Pauline at the service desk were very friendly and did a great job!
- Close bye you have the metromover station which connects you to the city
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