Great location, friendly service, pricey food
I stayed here for a conference from Thursday, October 25, 2012 and was supposed to leave on October 28th but thanks to SuperStorm Sandy, and multiple cancelled flights back to the East Coast, I was forced to extend my stay and finally left on Friday, November 2.
The good: Clean rooms and comfortable beds, fast check-in, great location close to the airport but not noisy from a jet way standpoint. The conference was held in a great ballroom, spacious and comfortable and seemed like there was great communication with the hotel and the conference people, so all went well with the conference. Service personnel were friendly and smiling (always a good sign!) and said hello. Shuttle service to and from the airport is free and I never waited long in any direction. Since I was stranded here by SuperStorm Sandy, I made several trips to the airport trying to straighten out flights.
The exercise facility is clean, well equipped, has a well stocked bottled water dispenser (which I used to refill my re-usable water bottle once I discovered the cost to purchase water in the hotel--see below). There are individual TVs on each of the cardio workout machines so you can watch whatever you like as long as you have your earphones. The exercise room was being cleaned constantly whenever I worked out, so I know the equipment was clean. I always clean off the equipment after myself but not everyone is conscious to do this, but I saw the cleaning personnel do this multiple times while I was there.
The bad: Restaurants--The Cafe and the Bistro are the only 2 that I used while I was here--are very pricey. $6 for a bottle of water!! Breakfast buffet was $22 (and even though they did offer omelets made any way that you want them, you had to know to ask for them, since there wasn't a station with someone making them). The room keys seemed to de-magnetize easily and this only happened to me once (and I am very conscious about not putting the key near anything that will de-magnetize it), but others who were at the conference had multiple trips downstairs to fix their keys and I witnessed a man on my floor pick up the hotel phone and SCREAM to speak to a manager at the desk since he had made 3 trips to fix the key and it still didn't work.
I was very conscious of the smell of cigarette smoke in the entire lobby area, even though there was no smoking in that area, it seems that it must have wafted in from outside. I noticed that there is a designated smoking area a little distance from the door, but the smell of cigarettes indoors is so foreign to me anymore since no one is allowed to smoke indoors in NJ, that it was particularly noticeable and unpleasant.
The kiosk to print boarding passes was out of order much of the time and even though it seemed easy enough to fix it if it was out of paper, it wasn't clear who you needed to check with to fix it. Granted, there were a lot of people stranded here during the storm and may have put undue stress on the machine to try to print boarding passes that were not printing because the flights were cancelled, so not sure about that.
I was given a code for internet access so I did not have to pay for it (that was GREAT) but I seemed to have to enter the code each day and sometimes multiple times per day on my iPad in order to maintain connection. The connection was nil in the lobby, restaurants and second floor where there are some conference rooms as well as in the lower lobby where the exercise room is located so to get a good connection, I needed to be in my room.
The ugly: Once I realized that I was going to have to stay an extra 5 nights before I could fly home (initially I had a flight booked in 2 days which got cancelled since the SuperStorm was the worst in our area literally in history, so it ended up being a total of 5 extra days before I could leave), the hotel promised the conference attendees that our conference rate would apply until we could leave. I was given this rate ($139 per night) for the first 2 extended nights and then told that my rate would have to be increased to $169 per night which I was told was less than the $209 per night which I otherwise would have been charged. I contacted the event manager who had been promised by the hotel management that the attendees would not be charged the full rate and confirmed this had been promised and yet the hotel staff seemed to know nothing about it, I was told. What really made me livid was at a trip to the airport to check on getting a flight out earlier, there were printed notices that the airline personnel were handing out that said that Hilton LAX was offering a 'stranded flyer special rate of $74 per night' for the same nights that I was told that I had to pay $169 per night!!! When I went back to the hotel with the printed notice to ask for this rate, after some discussion with a manager, I was given the rate of $74 for only 2 of the nights and then up again to $169 for the last night even though that night was one of the nights that the hotel had advertised as included in the special rate. OK, I was happy that they at least honored the $74 per night for the 2 nights but why did I have to ASK for this rate if this is what they were offering 'stranded travelers'? They KNEW I was a stranded traveler from the get-go. I was just very disappointed in being treated this way and very sad that this is the way I will remember this experience. If it hadn't been for this one factor, I would have given the hotel an overall 4 stars.