This past weekend I stayed at the Hyatt Regency Pier 66 in Ft. Lauderdale, I’m in the area frequently and most often I’ve stayed at the Westin Diplomat but I had a couple of expiring Faster Free Nights so I thought I’d burn them rather than converting them to 5000 Gold Passport points each.
My wife and I arrived checked into a 10th floor tower executive room on Friday night and there was old food sitting on the ground on balcony, attracting swarms of ants.
They had said the hotel was sold out when we checked in, it was late, and the ants weren’t likely to get into the room. So I didn’t worry about it.
The room itself was fine, it did smell like a South Florida hotel that’s 40 years old, but the view sort of made up for it.
We were incorrectly checked out after one day of our two day stay. Apparently, though the reservation was made as one two-day stay, in the hotel system it appeared as split up two one-night stays. This was noted at check-in, and I was told there’d be no problem. But when I saw the bill under our door in the morning I knew that was wrong.
It was a redemption stay and our bill had the Gold Passport internal reimbursement rate charged to us instead of to Hyatt Gold Passport. I saw that on the bill under our door on the first night. It was removed at the front desk, but it re-appeared after the second night.
As a Diamond I was told they simply take breakfast off the bill automatically, “the computer does it,” there are no coupons for breakfast in the restaurant. This was confirmed by the restaurant. But breakfast was on our bill and had to be removed.
I was in the room when housekeeping came on Saturday, I asked them to return later. When we went out to dinner I called down to ask for housekeeping to service the room. We came back four hours later, they never came. (And the turn down service offered at check-in never came, either.)
Consistent with my other experiences during the stay, the flavored water in the lobby was naturally empty and not replenished.
All minor annoyances for sure. The biggest issue was that my wife was working out on the treadmill in the hotel gym, only one of the three treadmills was functional (the other two had missing emergency stop switches and wouldn’t function at all as a result).
My wife is training for a marathon and needed to get in a run. A woman asked her how much longer she’d be on the treadmill, and my wife told her 30 minutes. The woman cursed the malfunctioning other treadmills and stormed off. Fifteen minutes later, she returned with hotel security and explained that the front desk had sent them to remove my wife from the treadmill because she was hogging it.
At that point my wife had only 15 minutes left of her run, and had never been asked if she’d mind ending her run early, which she would have done if the woman hadn’t simply run off in a huff.
My wife went to the front desk and the Front Office Manager said that the woman had never contacted the desk at all, security was there only because the woman had asked them to accompany her but hadn’t gotten an explanation as to why.
Now, the hotel was not at fault for the woman’s behavior, though if their treadmills were functional the confrontation would have been avoided. But their security guard’s behavior — he just stood by while the woman insinuated he was there in a show of force to remove her – was inappropriate, when he wasn’t there for any such purpose and hadn’t been sent there by management, contra the woman’s claims. The front office manager promised to ‘investigate further’ and be back in touch with us. He wasn’t, though I checked out with him the next day and he shared that the woman was both nuts and entitled, he couldn’t apologize enough.
Ultimately I suppose that the hotel is convenient for an overnight before or after a cruise departing Ft. Lauderdale. It has a decent pool area and rooms are perfectly well-renovated. But after the repeated service issues we experienced, we’re unlikely to return.
If my complaints are unreasonable I have no doubt y’all will let me know in the comments!
