W St Petersburg, Russia [Master Thread]
I had a three night stay in the recently opened W St Petersburg. Decided to write a miniTR.
The hotel is not yet fully operational and three floors are still to be completed. At the time of check-in, I was told that since they are quite full, I can't be upgraded to a suite and instead I will be upgraded to a Spectacular room from Marvelous room. The room we got was on the first floor, overlooking a rubbish dump. I checked the reservation and discovered that I had in fact booked a spectacular room which as per spg.com should have panoramic views of the city and cathedral and should be on a high floor. I went and complained to the front desk, and after some toing and froing I was told that they were full that night and that we will be moved to another room the next day. We were moved to a similar room on the fifth floor next day.
The only platinum recognition in the property is the standard welcome gift.
The hotel has a coffee shop and a restaurant. There are not too many options on the restaurant menu, however the hotel is very centrally located and there are plenty of restaurants within 5-10 mins of walking distance. There are a couple of Indian restaurants just next to the hotel, and we ended up eating there a few times.
The staff are very friendly and helpful, however are new and were stressed out as we were there during the long Russian holiday weekend and they were quite full (one of the front desk girls told my wife that the hotel that weekend was full of rude Russians from Moscow and that somebody swore at her in the morning for telling him that breakfast ended at 11am and that he will have to eat in the cafe rather than the main restaurant as it was closed for breakfast).
The property still has teething troubles- we were locked out of our room as the key card was not working, and the engineer had to come and remove the lock unit and replace it with a new one before we could get in. We wanted to watch an in-room movie, but the in-room movie function was disabled and we had to make several phone calls to whatever whenever, which became very hilarious towards the end as there were six people in our room trying to get the system working, until somebody figured out that the reception has to enable In-room movie option for someone to watch movies.