The 2/5 is being generous
I'm not quite sure where to start. I suppose I'll start from a chronological beginning. I ate at the restaurant the first night and the food definitely wasn't what I would expect for the prices. On a good note, the breakfast food was pretty good. For me it was complimentary although they tried to charge me for it. I had to ask her if she was certain because I know I had complimentary breakfast. They actually give you a bill for $0 which I guess depending on how you feel could be good or bad - good because I feel kinda bad not tipping and have been in the complimentary breakfast situation where I don't have cash before; bad because they don't really do anything that is deserving of a tip since it's buffet style. There is made to order food, I got fried eggs which were cooked very well - didn't try the omelettes.
Moving on, the room is decent, although there was a very obvious, odd looking stain on the chair in my room that looked like it could have been bodily fluid so I just stayed away from that chair. The sink didn't drain which I'm sure if I complained about it they would have fixed the issue, but in my experience a drain doesn't clog overnight and it seems like that is something they should check between guests. Anyone cleaning the sink would have seen it since it drains so slowly that any amount of water coming out of the faucet very quickly builds up.
Room service was nice but one night I did not get it and after a long day at work I came back to the hotel and had to call it in. They said they would send someone up. I was getting ready to go to the gym and taking care of some things and thirty minutes later no one had came, so when I went to the gym I went by the front desk and had to remind them again I did not get room service. The good news is that I guess two times is the charm here because after I came back from the gym my room was cleaned.
The equipment in the gym was old and and very sketchy. I was afraid the treadmill's belt would just snap and I would go running into the console. No screens on the two treadmills, one of which did not work. No towels in the gym, but there was a water tank. The dumbells had paint peeling off them and the whole place just needed an overhaul. I've seen worse hotel gyms as far as equipment goes, but not any that seemed so run down.
The pool is right beside the gym and it's pretty nice. A nice L-shaped pool and it's good for swimming laps. The hot tub is a half circle and very large - fits maybe 20. The pool was never overly crowded either. Nothing bad to say about the pool.
I did not use the valet laundry and wasn't sure if it actually even existed - although I'm sure it did. There is an easily available washer and dryer (two each) that I used to do laundry. There is no change machine though so bring your own quarters. It was pretty convenient and the machines worked well, but there is no where to watch your laundry washing from except the atrium. In this hotel all rooms are exposed to an inner atrium, almost like outside motel rooms but inside. It's an odd layout to say the least and I like the novel idea, but the downside is that they get very hot due to the greenhouse effect (sweating hot) during the day.
If this was the hotel I probably would have given it 3/5, but the big downside was the internet. The internet was complimentary, but it seems like you can't really say a service is complimentary if you don't provide said service. Sure you will see some wireless routers and you might even be able to open a google page, but probably 90% of the time the internet is so slow (about 10x slower than dial up), that you won't be doing anything productive, and most of the time the browser just gives up loading the page. A ping test from a command prompt will show about 90% of the time ping tests just time out. In this day and age internet is necessary and I need it for work and finding things to do in SD. I think I would take a lack of hot water over a lack of internet. The lesson I learned here is that I need to start tethering my phone for places such as this. Along the same lines as the internet, the television service was also terrible. There are about thirty channels and for about two days half of these channels didn't work. I called and asked and apparently there was a conflict about who will provide the channels so they just were saying "shut up and color" to that complaint. I also called about the internet situation and the solution was just to connect to a different access point.
The last day I was there I suppose there was an event outside and they were playing clubbing music extremely loud with a DJ, just about to the point where things would be shaking in my room (or any room that would face the pool which would be 1/4 I think since the pool sits in a crook between two of the four 'points'). I'm usually not the party pooper type that sits in my room, but Sunday at noon? Really? I'm trying to relax and read and look over some work, like most people would probably do on a Sunday, not have a dance party at the pool.
Pros:
- Pool is decent
- Breakfast
Cons:
- Poor gym
- Poor service
- I would label the internet as non-operational
- Sunday at noon? Really?