NYC Hotels
I’ll be in NYC later this month for a [business blogging seminar](http://www.sixapart.com/business/seminar-contact) and will stay at the [Westin Times Square](http://www.westinny.com/). It looks good, besides the practically useless flash site (sidenote, if ever an industry could use blogs, it’s hotels!). In the past I’ve stayed at the [Shelburne](http://www.affinia.com/NYC-Hotel/Shelburne-Murray-Hill/overview.cfm), [70 Park Ave](http://www.70parkave.com/) — all good — Pam stayed at the [Giraffe](http://www.hotelgiraffe.com/) and raved.
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I stayed at the 70 Park Avenue hotel this past week and it was a horrible experience! Upon entering my room, there was a note from the manager informing me that there would be no hot water for showers that day due to “repairs,” and that I should “plan accordingly.” (No one bothered to mention this at check-in.) Then I found out that there would be no air conditioning until “sometime around midnight.” The reason? “Unforeseen repairs,” according to the hotel manager.
The hotel boasts of its flat screen TVs, but when I tried to turn the tube on, the entire top one-third of the picture was not viewable because of large multi-colored lines that completely obscured that part of the screen. When I tried to adjust the volume on the TV that, too, did not work. So, I called the front desk and they sent up a repair person who apologized and said, “The monitor and sound system are defective and will have to be replaced.” Of course they weren’t able to do this during my stay: “We will have to order a new monitor and system.”
At first I thought I had entered a personal “bad karma” zone. However, my other business associates who were attending a conference at the hotel said they had similar problems with their in-room sound systems, air conditioning, monitors and hot water.
For our business meeting we needed to hook up a VCR to the monitor in the conference room. Since those of us in our group are somewhat technically challenged, we called for the hotel’s technical person responsible for assisting with in-hotel conferences. You guessed it; he could not get it to work. He just shurgged and said, “Sorry, but I really don’t know that much about how to hook things up with this sound system and the flat screen monitors.” (A hotel media person who doesn’t know how the equipment in his own hotel works?!)He then asked, “Do you have something else that you can use instead of our equipment?” (We ultimately ended up hooking up the VCR to our own projector and projecting that image onto the wall in the room, since the hotel had no projection screens.)
Another minor annoyance: no coffee pots in the rooms. I thought this wasn’t that big of a deal at first; I figured I would just walk down to the lobby and get a cup of complementary coffee or—worst case scenario—buy one from the restaurant and take it up to my room. WRONG. There was no complementary coffee and no restaurant service before 7 a.m. The front desk clerk said I could order a cup through room service. Fine. I trudged back upstairs and ordered room service. A two-cup pot of coffee was $12.50 plus tip. What a ripoff!
There were other less annoying issues throughout the stay as well such as: coffee pots in the conference room that did not work. (They were the large pump type and the pump did not work. Imagine a group of 14 bleary-eyed executives at 8 a.m. who can’t get coffee out of a pot! Not a pretty sight.)
I was surprised by this horrible experience, since I had recently stayed at the hotel’s sister property in Manhattan, the Muse, and found it to be relatively pleasant.
But from now on I’m sticking with “known” properties that have no surprises such as Westin, Four Seasons, Hyatt or…at the very least…Marriott.
Wow! Thanks for sharing that experience. We def had a good time there. I wonder if there was a management change or something.
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