I'll add my welcome to travelingtom as well.
We stayed at this property earlier this month and had pretty similar experiences to those that Tom mentioned. I'm a Plat member and was pretty surprised at how badly they got the minor things wrong.
Just to set the scene, we queued at check-in and one of the agents was dealing with a walk-in from the street. He was quoting the guy a price for a suite for the night. The price corresponded with the price I had seen on SPG.com that morning. The other agent then called over and said I can do you a better deal than that for a suite and wrote something down. He then asked how many suites they had available for the next two nights as some other members of his group might want one and was told they had plenty. He was then escorted by the other agent to see a room.
We then checked in and I handed over my credit card and Plat card to the agent. He went through the usual welcomes and gave us a room key etc and returned the credit card and membership card. At that point I asked about the Platinum Amenity and he apologised for missing this first time round in the reservation and the via the card I gave to him. He then said that he had a great seaview room for us as a Platinum member.
We head to the room and it is a large, but unrenovated room with a partial sea view. Not great, but if that is the best they have, that is the best they have. Then we discover that the bed linen is actually used linen, with the bed being re-made. There was also some dirty underwear behind the bathroom door and the soap and shampoo was open and used. The room had been vacated, but clearly hadn't been fully cleaned and set up for a new guest.
Back down at reception we tell the check-in agent of the room problem and he apologises and tells us that he has a better room available for us - a renovated seaview room with a balcony. I enquire why we weren't offered this 10 minutes ago and he shrugs. I ask if this is the best available room for a Platinum upgrade and he says that it is. So off we go to the room and it is a bit smaller, but much nicer and we start unpacking. I then head off to one of the shops to get a few drinks and snacks and bump into the walk-in guy from check-in. I ask him if he got sorted and was happy to confirm that he got a great deal for him and a couple of buddies. He said that they got suites sorted for the price of a standard room in exchange for slipping a few $ the way of the agent in question. (Just to note, that is what he stated, not what I saw) He also said they had quite a few suites left and he suggested that I should 'try the same trick' with the agent.
At this point, I wasn't too delighted so I thought I would take it up with the duty manager. I asked the concierge team if they could ask the duty manager to give me a call in my room as I didn't want to have a discussion in the lobby about some concerns I had with regards to upgrades and the way they were being distributed. Five minutes later I got a call, but it was from the check-in agent who sounded in a bit of a panic. Apparently he had just realised that he had a suite available and he wanted to make sure that we were moved to it. (Quite uncanny timing don't you think?) He came over personally to move us to the suite and to apologise for the earlier room problem. We still asked to speak with the duty manager as we wanted to give some feedback and he was very keen that we gave the feedback through him, which we declined to do.
A little while later we got a call from the duty manager who was very apologetic again for the moves. I asked about the rooms and Plat recognition and he told me that they upgraded Plats to the best available views that they had. I countered that I realise that rooms aren't always available and that Plats are only entitled up to standard suites (where available) and I enquired if our room was a standard suite, which he didn't seem to know. He also offered us a couple of breakfast coupons for the inconvenience which he was going to drop off himself. These came 20 minutes later, but they were dropped off by a member of the valet parking staff. It did make me wonder if the person on the phone really was the duty manager after all...
The rest of the stay was ok, but nothing special. Breakfast service was very slow, with staff standing around and chatting, but not serving guests. The pool area was unstaffed and they had a large pile of dirty towels and no clean ones when we went to the pool, so we headed back to the room. It was just a number of small things like this that left a poor impression, so I could understand the comments by Tom.
It may be that the hotel seems even more below par as we also stayed at the Westin Diplomat and Diplomat Resort on the same vacation. Two properties that know how to deal with SPG members and maintained a pretty strong standard of service during our stays there.
Overall the shenanigans at check-in left a pretty bad taste about the property. The service experienced after that didn't do anything to change our perception. I certainly don't think I could recommend the property to others, although I hope our experience was an isolated one.