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 26th 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 26th 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
2 Comments
Comments are closed.