cblaisd

Finished a 4 night reduced point stay there this week. Upgraded to one of the King Executive Rooms on the 2nd floor. BART tracks 100 feet away. Unlike the previous poster, we were not bothered. The windows looked like they had been beefed up and the curtains were very thick and clearly sound-absorbing.

The best thing about the hotel is the staff (with one notable exception, below). They were simply great - polite, helpful, enthusiastic. EXCEPT: the first night, about 8:30pm I went to the restaurant wanting a cup of coffee to go. The person in the restaurant sighed one of those Dramatic Sighs and said she'd "have to go back inside" (whatever that means) and that coffee wasn't available and there was a little bit left in one of the pots from earlier in the day and she'd be glad to "nuke" it for me. I went to the front desk, explained the transaction to the manger on duty, said that I didn't expect to be treated like that at an Embassy Suites. She said that she would have a pot of coffee sent up to the room. 15 minutes later it appeared, with a nice handwritten note of apology and one of those little two-truffle boxes.

But we won't be staying there again.

The mattress was indeed soft and lumpy. (This stay was bookended by stays at two different SFO HGIs. What a huge difference those beds were -- in a good sense!)

The breakfast area is tiny and, as seems endemic to Embassy Suites, was a cattle car setup. The made-to-order line stretched well into the lobby one morning and the place was a mess (spilled food on the floors and the counters. Ugh). The furniture is arranged so that if there are a lot of people in that line, it is almost impossible to get to the again much-too-tiny alcove where the coffee, cereal, etc., are. There is only one coffee urn in that alcove and virtually no room, again, if there are more than half a dozen people in the room. It would not take a lot of remodeling to fix some of these issues. There is a conference room immediately adjacent the tiny breakfast area that could be added on to that breakfast area. And the lobby is awash in ferns and very wasted space. More so than any other ES I've ever seen.

The hot tub was dirty one morning. Ugh.

The "high speed" internet was atrocious. Dial-up would have been faster.

One day, when leaving at 10am for a couple of hours, asked to have the room cleaned during that two hours. Came back at 2pm and it still hadn't been done.

A small but repeatedly annoying thing. On the corridor from the lobby area to the breakfast area there are Really Giant Ferns. It is not possible for for two people to pass one another without getting whacked in the face with a fern.