Not really what I've come to expect from a Hilton
Certainly this hotel is conveniently located in the Union Square section of San Francisco. And certainly it has the grand lobby, coffee shop and restaurant that you expect from a Hilton. But not much else. A bit unnerving was the constant presence of uniformed security guards at each entrance, which made me wonder if they've had some trouble of some sort.
Here are my impressions:
After fighting traffic for two hours on the 101 and on SF surface streets, I was ready to simply let the valet do his thing and be done with it. I pulled up to the front entrance (on O'Farrell) and spotted a very well-dressed doorman who was engaged in conversation with a limo driver. I waited, and waited some more, then I got blocked in by a cab. Finally, when the limo was ready to back into my rental car, I had my passengers disembark and I went off, with our luggage in search of a place to park, steamed at not getting any attention from the doorman/valet.
Turns out the real parking, including valet, is around the corner. I chose self-park with in an out privileges and managed to get 5 suitcases from the 9th floor of the garage to the lobby, where I found my party.
The que for the front desk is ambiguous, at best. It's one of those old, long grand counters but there wasn't a clear place to line up for next to be serviced. I chose to stand behind someone being waited upon and saw others arrive, confused as I was not knowing really where to wait.
The breakfast buffet wasn't bad, but we had an interesting situation regarding billing. On our first day, our waiter simply took our breakfast coupons (Hilton Diamond members get a complimentary breakfast which you can upgrade to a full buffet for $10) but never brought us a bill. When I asked him for a bill, he said we didn't need one. "But I want to leave you a tip" I responded. He brought us a "$0.00" charge slip on which I added a $10 tip. We never were charged the upcharge and the next day we were charged appropriately.
No fault of the hotel, but our lie-in on both days was interrupted at 7 a.m. with some sort of protest from the street below. Repetitious, monotonous and loud describe the noise that found its way to our room and awakened us. Then, promptly at 8, the noise stopped. I'm all for freedom of speech but this experience kind of soured us on the whole "wake up in a nice hotel" vacation time to which we were looking forward to.
The room was clean, but not entirely outfitted. I had to turn the tissue dispenser over to let the housekeeping staff know that we didn't have an Kleenex. Additionally, our room was outfitted with one of those hideous "motion detector" thermostats that, unless your thrash about in your sleep, turn off the A/C until, finally, in a sweat, you wake up and flail to get the a/c back on. When this happened to us, it was 76 degrees in the room.
This property has a lot of potential, but really could use a thorough top to bottom training program for its staff. Probably would opt for a different property in future.
The self-parking is convenient, with in and out privileges. As we left