I Normally Love Double Tree... But Not This Time
I usually love staying at Double Tree. They are clean, have good service and usually decently priced. Unfortunately, the Double Tree in San Pedro falls way below any Double Tree I have ever stayed at.
We were staying here one night before a cruise the next day and lets just say I am happy it was only one night...
I arrived at 3 PM, well 2:55 and went to check in. They told me my room was not ready yet, but she just needed to call housekeeping and it would only be a minute. I walked around the lobby for a second and was quickly called back to the front by the front desk agent. She told me it would be another 45 minutes to an hour before my room was ready, even though check-in time was at 3. She then told me I was welcome to use the restaurant...
Strike 1: No apology, no attempting to make it better by offering a drink coupon or anything, just sent me in the direction of the restaurant. It would have been really easy for me to write a positive review if she had just apologized, that at least shows me that she cares. But I got nothing.
Exhausted from a 9 hour drive, we decided we would eat lunch in the restaurant. Normally I don't like to eat in hotel restaurants because they are over priced and usually not very good, but we did not want to drive anywhere and decided we would give it a shot.
Strike 2: The food and service at their restaurant is awful! For starters there was only 3 other people sitting there and there were 3 people serving. That would tell me each person would be responsible for one table and service should be quick. Oh was I wrong. We waited about 15 minutes just to be offered anything to drink and that was followed with a "What do you want??" We must have been inconveniencing her because she clearly didn't want to deal with us. 30 minutes later when we finally got the food it was so disgusting that we barely ate any of it because we thought we might throw up. We just wanted to get to our room, but we still had to wait.
After our experience at the restaurant we went back to the front and I told the guy that we needed to get into our room. He looked at me like I was an idiot and asked what our room number was. I told him we didn't have one yet, which seemed to confuse him. Another 5 minutes went by of him fiddling around with the computer and finally we got our keys.
Strike 3: I was never recognized as being a Honors Gold Member, I was never given any information about the hotel or about breakfast (which I am supposed to get for free as a benefit of being an Honors member) and I was still never given an apology.
We got up to the room, and the room was clean and it seemed fine. My only complaint with the room is all of the dirty sheets (surely from the people the night before) sitting in the hall right in front of my door. How nice. When we got in the room it was very warm, so we turned the A/C down a couple notches and left to get a couple last minute things for our cruise the next morning. When we got back our room was freezing. So we turned the A/C (not the heat) up just a little. Next thing we knew it was super hot again, so back to turning it down. This went on all night and we ended up waking up for good at 5am because we could not tolerate it anymore. There was no happy medium. It was either hot or freezing cold.
The hotel will allow you to arrange transportation to the port, but with how everything else had gone so far, we got a ride from family who was coming in that morning to cruise with us. We were able to leave our car parked at the hotel for the whole cruise, and honestly, that is the only reason I gave this hotel 2 stars instead of one.
A couple other things to keep in mind. There are tons of kids at this hotel cruising with their families and it is like staying at a Chuck-E-Cheese. The entire night there were kids running up and down the halls, slamming doors and being extremely annoying. No, this is not the hotel's fault, but I still feel they should have done something about this. Also there is no wireless internet in the rooms. They have wired, but lets be honest, who uses wired anymore? In this day and age you use tablets or smart phones, and I'm pretty sure no one has an ethernet cord in their phone.
In conclusion, this hotel is very close to the port, but there are other hotels close by as well. Even if you are an Honors member like me and want to stay at a Hilton because you want to use your points, or get points... Don't. I stayed there because I was able to use my points, so basically it was free, but I am not happy that I did. I wish I had saved my points and stayed elsewhere because this was not a good use of my points. Find somewhere else to stay if you are in the area for a cruise, I know we will.