The effect of Marriott Rewards category changes  is clearly seen for a selection of San Francisco hotels. The value of Marriott Rewards points is dropping around the Bay Area on May 16, 2013 when the majority of hotels rise by one category level.

Hotel reward category reassignment for 2013 is a nearly across the board increase; 5,000 points per reward night at 16 of 21 hotels closest to San Francisco. A number of category 4 hotels currently at 20,000 points per night or 80,000 points for 5 nights are rising to category 5; a 25% increase in reward stay cost.  Read More…

I have to face the fact that I do not like staying at the St. Regis San Francisco. The hotel has many endearing qualities like a fantastic bed and linens, great bathtub, a large fitness center and pool. There is even a yoga room.

But I get a bad vibe every time I stay at this hotel.

In December I stayed two nights at the St. Regis San Francisco courtesy of the SPG American Express Amex Stars blogger outreach program I was invited to participate in for 2012.

Luxury hotel stays are aspirational for some travelers. After taking advantage of free hotel stays with SPG Amex Stars to visit St. Regis Princeville Kauai, St. Regis San Francisco and St. Regis Bal Harbour (Miami Beach), I have developed the opinion that I love luxury class hotel rooms, but I do not like the luxury hotel environment. The cost of nearly everything at a luxury hotel is more than I care to spend. And the commonly free items at hotels like ice and coffee can set you back $5 to $10 an order throughout your stay.

Even worse for me than the high prices at large luxury hotels are the multitude of staff. The staff members are almost always kind and engaging. There are frequently more staff than guests walking around when I am at a St. Regis. It is kind of like being in a beautiful office building. Most of the people around are employees. And all the greetings from a staff member require a reciprocal response from me. Isn’t it rude not to return a greeting?

St. Regis San Francisco Read More…

Three weeks ago I suggested San Francisco Starwood Hotels had optimistically high hotel rates for the July 4 weekend. Rates today for this July 4 weekend have dropped to their lowest level for six of the seven San Francisco city hotels (Le Meridien had an incredible $109 rate last week).

AAA rates are at their lowest level of the past three weeks for all seven San Francisco Starwood Hotels just three days before the weekend.

Four of the seven Starwood hotels loaded their lowest rates of the month just today.

Last minute rate drops are the primary reason to avoid prepaid, nonrefundable room rates.

Update: July 1 – Rates dropped even more down to $129 today for the Westin St. Francis for tomorrow night. Westin Market Street dropped to $109. These are the lowest rates of the past month for these two hotels. Le Meridien dropped to $129 today for this weekend.

The night before last was actually kind of cold in San Francisco, but not really cold enough for ice. The USA is in the deep freeze right now and in San Francisco ice is made for entertainment. A seasonal ice rink is set up on Union Square, San Francisco and will be dismantled after next weekend.

The temp was in the low 50s when I snapped this photo Thursday night. The Westin St. Francis Hotel and Tower at Union Square are seen in the background. Monterey was 72 degrees yesterday, but San Francisco was only about 62 downtown.

At least most of America rarely experiences earthquakes.   The 6.5 earthquake that shook Humboldt County a few hours ago is the biggest earthquake there since 1992.

[Mon. Jan 11 - Update: News from Eureka Times-Standard indicates there was some significant structural damage in Eureka. Old Town Bar & Grill is a place I frequented many times in the 1980s. Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, the Wailers...good memories. The building was red tagged for structural damage.]

Eureka, California was my hometown from 1989-1992 and 1996-2001.  I had spent eight months organizing an education conference for teachers when at the end of the first hour of the conference on April 25, 1992 at the Red Lion Inn in Eureka, a 7.2 earthquake hit. Hundreds had to evacuate the hotel and I had to cancel the conference. There were two more major earthquakes, 6.5 and 6.7 within the next 18 hours. They really shook me up.

I wrote about earthquakes in a Loyalty Traveler post after staying at the Palace Hotel this past April 18, 2009 on the 103rd anniversary of the great San Francisco quake. There were two survivors at the commemoration ceremony. One of those persons, Jeanette Scola Trapani, died last week at age 107.

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/loyaltytraveler/2009/04/23/history-of-the-san-francisco-palace-hotel-and-california-earthquakes/

Grand Hyatt San Francisco just off Union Square

San Francisco hazy sunset from Twin Peaks (geographic center of the city) today

A few days after the Humboldt County earthquakes I presided over a statewide education conference in San Francisco. The Rodney King police beating acquittal verdict occurred just as the three day conference was scheduled to begin and initiated riots throughout the state.

I stopped organizing education conferences.

Oyster Hotel Reviews is a website offering users an abundance of visual information through hundreds of photos for a single hotel. This colorful photo hotel review site has been developing a portfolio of hotel reviews, one city at a time, for the past year. I like the concept of showing numerous photos of a hotel. Recently, San Francisco hotels were added to the site.

I commented to a hotelier once that when I write about hotels I want bias in my review. There is the AAA Tour Guide for a sterile, just the facts hotel description. A reader benefits from finding a reviewer with similar travel style and interests. Most Oyster Hotel Reviews have personality.

The interesting aspect of the Oyster Hotel Reviews is the different take I have on many of the hotels and neighborhoods described by the reviewers in San Francisco. I think travel reviewers are like music DJs.

My experience may not have been the typical experience for a hotel guest, but it was my experience. I try to reflect my stays accurately, good and bad, when I choose to review a hotel. I try to separate what may be one time circumstantial inadequacies from what appear to be systemic issues with the hotel experience. As always, hotel loyalty elite membership usually makes a significant impact on the hotel stay experience.

A common statement I see repeatedly in the Oyster hotel reviews for San Francisco are locals don’t hang out in the SOMA arts district, Union Square shopping and theatre district, or the Financial District. That doesn’t help me as a hotel guest with the hotel location. You don’t tell me where locals hang out. Besides, do I really want to be where the locals hang out? I’m a tourist.

Together with Fisherman’s Wharf, another area where locals don’t hang out much, these four areas contain 90% of the hotel rooms in San Francisco. There are 10,000 to 20,000+ tourists in these neighborhoods on any given day and plenty of businesses to cater to them. Restaurants, bars, and cafes are all around the downtown area. The central Financial District around the Mandarin Oriental and Le Meridien is a location a little more closed up at night and weekends, but there are great pubs and restaurants scattered throughout even the financial district.

The entire central business district of San Francisco is the hotel area for 95% of the city’s rooms. Of the city’s 750,000 locals, 95% live in other parts of San Francisco. San Francisco seems like a small city until you try moving from one end to the other in a bus or taxi.

 

Oyster Hotel Review – Starwood Hotels Luxury Collection – The Palace 

In the service section the reviewer states there was no doorman at arrival to help with bags and follows with the statement, “That wouldn’t happen at the St. Regis.”  Well, that did happen to me at the St. Regis last June when I was ignored by the doormen. Car valets were standing within 15 feet of me and didn’t bother to assist me at a time when no other guests were arriving.

One issue I have noticed with the Oyster reviews is the tendency to label hotel rooms as suites when there is not a separate sitting area room.

My helpful suggestion to make the photo sets more user-friendly is please use the same labels as the hotel’s own website uses for room types so a reader can match the Oyster photos to the correct room rate when searching hotel rates.

I find it interesting that the bed at the Palace Hotel was described as “sumptuous”.  Perhaps I like an abnormally firm bed since in my opinion I found the soft, bouncy bed the most serious flaw of the property after staying in three different rooms at the Palace Hotel this year.  The reviewer may have never had a back injury to know the value of a firm mattress.

Loyalty Traveler Palace Hotel review April 20, 2009 

History of the San Francisco Palace Hotel and California Earthquakes – Loyalty Traveler April 23, 2009

 

St. Regis San Francisco

Oyster Hotel reviews rates the St. Regis San Francisco as the best luxury hotel in the city. I won’t argue with that since I haven’t stayed in all the other luxury hotels. The St. Regis beds are the best I have slept on in 2009. The Oyster reviewer states a large staff prevented front desk pile-ups and the hotel has some of the best service in town.

A hotel may have only one opportunity to make a great impression. My three stays at the St. Regis San Francisco this year had me convinced the hotel had cut back too much on service. I didn’t feel the front desk was adequately staffed on several occasions. I saw inconsistencies in service between stays. The butler service is a standout feature of the hotel and that aspect of the service worked fine during all my stays.

Loyalty traveler St. Regis San Francisco hotel review part 1 – June 15, 2009

Loyalty traveler St. Regis San Francisco hotel review part 2 – June 16, 2009

 

Westin St. Francis

The Oyster.com reviewer suggests to readers to pick the Palace Hotel over the St. Francis. The rooms in the historic building are described as “small – 200 square feet or so.”

Sure, there are small rooms in the historic tower. I saw a woman once working her way around the bed in a tiny interior room and I wondered if she regretted booking the St. Francis. I have not stayed in one of those 200 square feet rooms.

I absolutely love the historic building rooms facing Union Square with windows that open and the sound of cable cars clanging below on Powell Street and musicians playing in the Square. My wife and I find the historic building of St. Francis to be some of the most romantic hotel rooms in the city. 

I am a Starwood Preferred Guest Platinum member. I book those 200 square feet room rates all the time when staying at the St. Francis. SPG elite-level membership means I have never actually had to stay in one of those small rooms. The Tower rooms are good for views, but lack the ambience of the historic section.

Loyalty Traveler Westin St. Francis Hotel review – June 7, 2009

 

Hyatt San Francisco

“Spitting distance from the Embarcadero and Union Square.”

The Embarcadero? True. The hotel is actually called the Hyatt Regency at the Embarcadero on building nameplates.

Spitting distance from Union Square? False

I recall being rather late for a meeting after a 15 minute walk to meet my sister last year.  I left the Hyatt Regency Club to meet her at the Starlight Room at the top of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel at Union Square. Even Tiger Woods would require a few long club drives to get his ball the 0.75 mile distance from the Hyatt Embarcadero to Union Square.

There is little mention of the top floor Regency lounge in the Oyster review. As a Hyatt Diamond elite-level member of Gold Passport I get complimentary access to the Regency lounge. This is a great lounge for relaxing, viewing the waterfront, eating snacks and breakfast, using computers, or relaxing in a full body massage chair. The lounge makes this hotel my favorite in San Francisco when the rates are low.

The reviewer also lists this hotel as a dull part of town at night. I love the food places at the Ferry building and there is a bit of life here after dark. Take a night ferry on San Francisco Bay. The hotel is physically connected to the Embarcadero Complex offering a few blocks of shopping, a variety of restaurants, a movie theater, and overground pedestrian bridges linking the complex from the Hyatt hotel  to Le Meridien Hotel (formerly Park Hyatt) on the opposite end of the complex. There isn’t going to be a 4am rave happening in the Embarcadero Complex, but if you want to eat and drink, go to a comedy club (The Punchline), or see a movie, you can find it all in this neighborhood.

Loyalty Traveler Hyatt Regency photos and website useability issue – August 25, 2009

Loyalty Traveler Hyatt Regency San Francisco review – August 5, 2008

 

Bottom line on hotel reviews: There are all types of travelers and all types of reviewers. One person’s experience and expectations may not mirror another’s.

I am glad to see Starwood Hotels St. Regis (Best Luxury Hotel), Westin St. Francis (Best Hotel Restaurant) and Le Meridien (Best Business Hotel) rate highly with Oyster Hotel Reviews for their best in class picks.

Oyster Hotel Reviews San Francisco Best Hotels link.

 

This is a San Francisco view from room 1108 Metropolitan Suite St. Regis taken Labor Day (Sep 7, 2009) at 6:13am on the corner of 3rd and Mission in San Francisco.  The roof tops of four major hotels are pictured under the past-full moon at dawn. From left to right are San Francisco Marriott on 4th Street, Hilton San Francisco (white tower in far background, 333 O’Farrell St), Four Seasons Hotel and Residences (Market St), and the Westin Market Street Hotel located on 3rd Street.

These four hotels alone have over 4,300 rooms and each hotel from upper floor locations offer some of the best high-rise urban landscape views in the city of San Francisco.

 

The W Hotel San Francisco is a 31-story hotel with 404 guestrooms. Historically this hotel is expensive. A low rate for the W SF is $159 to $179 per night. Rates most frequently hover around $219 to $249. San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center across the street frequently pushes rates into the $350 to $450 per night range.  

 

 

Currently there is a Fantastic Suite promotion for a 700 square feet room with 2 full baths. Lower floor suites are $500 per night and upper floor suites are $575. The clause in the booking rate states:

“No parties or meetings allowed!”

That just sounds whiny.

Arrival:

The parking entrance is located on one-way Howard Street just past the fire station.  This is downtown San Francisco and the blare of sirens comes gratis with the territory. A Howard Street facing room will guarantee more siren noise.

I pulled in to Wheels. Valet attendants promptly surrounded our car. The hotel front desk had at least 8 separate guests and couples waiting for check-in.  I joked with the parking attendant that I would be leaving the hotel to park and probably get back to the hotel before Kelley could reach the front desk.

The cost of parking is the primary complaint I see in W San Francisco hotel reviews. Parking is $45 + 14% city tax; over $51 for the night. Hybrid cars get 50% parking rates. San Francisco hotels have outrageous parking fees. As always, my advice for parking with the Starwood Hotels in this area: W Hotel, St. Regis, Westin Market Street, and The Palace Hotel is to park at the Hearst Garage on Third Street and Stevenson. Hearst Garage charges a flat rate $20 for 24-hour parking, but no in-and-out privileges. The W Hotel is the farthest Starwood Hotel in SoMa district from the garage at about 250 yards up Third Street. In other words, Hearst Parking is centrally located to these four Starwood Hotels, Marriott San Francisco, and Four Seasons. 

 

 

Back at the hotel, Kelley was waiting and the line was down to one guest. She was surprised at how slowly the line had moved and the fact that a second staff person did not appear until people had been waiting for about ten minutes. We still waited five more minutes while the one guest at the counter had an extraordinarily long check-in time. The second staffer had already departed.

 

 

My reservation using a free weekend night was upgraded from a 300 square feet Wonderful Room on a lower floor to a 400 square feet (or so they claim) Fabulous Corner Room on the 26^th floor. Our luggage was already stacked on a hotel cart and sitting in the lobby.  There were no staffers in the lobby to assist with the luggage after receiving the room key. I pulled the cart to the elevator myself and headed to our 26^th floor room.

 

Hotel Lobby Ambience:

W Hotels are a sensory experience. Colorful lighting, aural ambience, and tactile entertainment are the trademarks of a W Hotel stay. The elevator ride has color, smells from fragrant sticks in the corner, and music.

Music is a constant at the W Hotel. Music in the lobby, music in the elevators, music in the guest room hallway, and we kept the music playing in the room for much of our stay.

 

 

You either go with music or the noise can get irritating when you are on a low floor and XYZ Bar is in rave mode.

 

A Pacman video game and assorted board games and books are placed around the lobby.

 

 

The lobby has high ceilings and several couches and chairs for guests. I read in some other hotel reviews that internet is free access in the lobby but not free in the rooms. I will have to test out lobby internet wifi on a future trip.

 

 

The Room:

San Francisco is my frequent hotel stop and I still get a thrill from the W Hotel room city views. The location across from Yerba Buena Gardens and Moscone Convention Center means about half the rooms have an open view across the southern and westerly city landscape where few high-rise buildings block the view. Our “Fabulous” corner room at 2609 had windows with views from the northeast to the southwest. Seating benches in front of each of the three windows maximized the utility of the room’s high rise urban setting.

The room was incredibly bright on a clear sky day with abnormally high temperatures in the 90s throughout the entire city. We had driven through the city from Golden Gate Park where hundreds of shirtless guys and bikini-top clad women were heading to the first day of the three day Outside Lands Music festival. Parading bare skin is not unusual in San Francisco where nudity is tolerated to a large degree at public events, but walking around near bare due to the hot weather is a truly rare site for the regularly windy and fog-enveloped city of San Francisco.

The heat or exhibitionist behavior placed a naked guy in our line of sight for an inordinate amount of time early Friday evening before dinner.

Attention guests of St. Regis and W Hotels. Anyone with working far-sighted vision can see the 120 yards from building to building. Standing naked in your room with blinds open is not too discreet. 

 

 

The true W Hotel room test would be Wind. Could we get the AC to keep the room cool? The W wind machine worked like a charm.

 

 

The furniture in the room exuded an IKEA feel to me. The pieces were bright, functional, and plain. 

 

 

One of the features I did not like about the room is the sliding bathroom door with a glass panel. Turning on the light in the bathroom reflected too much light into the bedroom at night.

 

 

Bathroom is functional with stool and lighted mirror.

 

 

Little touches in the W tend to make me smile.

The room has more Asian design features than I recall from previous stays. Pieces like origami wall art in the bathroom and an Asian figurine on the desk, and room lucky numbers on the doorsign. 

 

 

A Buddha light on the shelf changed colors and provided nightlight. It wasn’t until I looked at my hotel room photos the next morning that I realized there was a switch to turn the light off.

 

 

The wall mounted 32-inch flat screen TV had some HDTV channels. Reading material is always a nice touch for a hotel room.

The W San Francisco Hotel Guide was placed on the desk top. Hotel guides with information about the hotel have been absent in many rooms I’ve stayed in lately.

The bathroom had Bliss bath products. Oddly there was only one robe in the room.

Bed lamps had adjustable lighting.

My impression over the years is the W San Francisco hotel rooms are a bit small. On this stay I pulled out the measuring tape and found the room to be significantly smaller than the 400 square feet advertised on the website for a Fabulous room. If the room had been a linear shaped rectangle the measurements would be 14 ft. x 26 ft. for a 364 square feet room. Those were the longest coordinates in the room and the room design ate into some of that space.

The room was so far off the stated measurement that I wrote a note to the hotel General Manager stating my measurements for 2609 do not come anywhere near the 400 square feet listed for Fabulous Rooms on the website. Actually the room is much closer to 300 square feet. Ceilings at 8 ft in most of the room provided more spaciousness than a typical hotel room.

 

 

 

The Views

Room 2609 views 

 

 

 

Pool and Fitness Room:

The hotel fitness room and pool state they are open 24 hours. I was up at 3:30am for the pool test. There is nothing like trying to swim at 3:30am to see if a pool really operates 24 hours.

I had a pleasant swim and the two staffers who came by and walked through the pool area did not inhibit my swimming at all.  The pool was so cool, literally when I entered, and figuratively as I settled into the groove of good music playing loudly over the stereo system in the pool area in the early morning hours. 

 

 

Good to know someone was watching in case I had an unfortunate swimming mishap. Technically the rules state swimming alone is not allowed, but who actually reads the fine print on the wall.

 

I noticed the rule after swimming, located about 5 or 6 rules down on the long list of posted pool rules on the wall.

 

 

W San Francisco Spa Tub in 4th floor pool area

A cool design feature is the symmetry of the spa tub when sitting and looking up. The spa pool is centered with the W building. The glass roof of the pool showed pink light illuminating the side of the W building.

 

The W San Francisco Building

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hotels are too quick to boast about room size in public.

Are hotels like men?

 

He whimsically described himself as having 400 fabulous square feet of room. His boisterous and seductive claims resulted in us spending the night together.  Later, when it was just the two of us alone, I had to wonder.

You said your room was how large?  Whose measuring stick were you using?

 

Don’t misinterpret the message.  There are no regrets about spending the night with you in your corner room. Your room was more than spectacular.

As the saying goes, “It is not the size of the ship, but the motion of the ocean.”

Your room wowed me with wild waves of excitement.

 

Don’t be embarrassed to tell people your real size.

Your 300 square feet is truly a wonderful size in and of itself.

 

 

 W Hotel San Francisco Room Categories:

Wonderful Room, 300 square feet, Floors 5-12

Spectacular Room, 300 square feet, Floors 14-31

Cool Corner Room, 400 square feet, Floors 5-18

Fabulous Room, 400 square feet, Floors 14-28 

 

 

Loyalty Traveler spent a wacky and withering weekend (Fabulous Room 2609) in the uncommon 90 degree heat of downtown San Francisco.

Here is an annotated video panorama of the hotels in the San Francisco SoMa district around Moscone Convention Center. The video is shot from the 4th floor patio of the St. Regis San Francisco.

Turn down your sound volume. I still need to work on the sound aspect of video. Lots of street and wind noise in this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw7CwjyqpIs

Hanging out in San Francisco this past weekend I made another trip to the Westin Market Street. The sky was wonderfully clear in San Francisco and the temperature was a California coastal perfect at 65 degrees.

Wasn’t I surprised to see that in my stays at the Westin Market Street I still haven’t had a room with the preferred view. The Westin St. Francis Hotel is prominent on the left and the Grand Hyatt is the tall skyscraper on the right. The Fairmont Hotel tower is on the far right in the background with a flag.  Even a Golden Gate Bridge tower can be seen on a clear day from this side of the hotel.

I was in the right room at the right time last week. Perhaps 3326 next time?