Disappointing customer service - rooms fine
I booked this room on points and am glad that I didn't pay for this hotel. Let's start with the positives: location is great - near Times Square, subway station, Central Park, short cab ride to LaGuardia, good fitness centre with lots of equipment, good rooms, nice recent reno job, free coffee and tea in the room, good sound proofing ONLY IF you do not have a connecting room to another (otherwise you are basically in the same room as your neighbour - these doors have NO soundproofing). The negatives: you pay for everything here - luggage storage is $3.25/bag when you check out, but not when you check in, $10/fitness centre visit or $20 for your stay, $15 for the internet/day, and in all honestly, service was not up to Sheraton/Starwood standards. We checked in at 10.30 am (I get it, not likely to get our room at that time) and were guaranteed a room after 3 pm. We came back at 5.30 pm to a huge line up at the reservation desk, so after waiting there for 20 minutes, we were told that we couldn't get a room until after 10 pm!! Are you kidding me?? Apparently it was because of the US Open this weekend and 3 airline crews checking out early, so they offered us a free breakfast with our 10 pm room. We immediately asked to speak to a manager, and we had to wait over 15 minutes for one to show up. We explained our situation and we finally got a room and some credit compensation. We ended up switching rooms the next day since we were giving an adjoining room and could hear everything the family next to us did/said. I was not impressed that we had to insist of speaking to manager to get a room. There were lots of others in the same boat as us and there didn't seem to be a good way to deal with anyone.
We travel a lot and are not super picky travelers, but customer service speaks volumes to me. I was just 'another paying customer' at this hotel, and wasn't treated with a ton of respect. The Sheraton is a huge chain, and I would think that dealing with busy times would be a no brainer. Offer people something if you're not going to get them in to the room they've paid for, starting at the time the clock starts ticking on it. It's really pretty basic, but the front desk managers were scrambling to figure things out - there was no plan here - just push off things on to the customers to deal with. The staff weren't empowered to really deal with things, either - they were just trying to get by and I felt really bad for them, too. Overall a real disappointment for such a big and trusted brand.