Like a snowball rolling downhill gathering speed and size, our stay at the Hilton Garden Inn Florence-Novoli last week began poorly and got worse. There was no single factor that caused us to feel this way, just a series of little things that continued day after day. By the time we left I may never have been so happy to check out of a hotel.

This is also mostly a purely personal post. I realize many of my comments are over small matters; for me the cumulative effect was this is a property I will not return to and would not recommend. Others likely will not feel the same nor react the same as I did.

The Hilton Garden Inn Florence-Novoli is not located in downtown Florence but requires either a bus or cab ride to get to the property. I knew this ahead of time, and frankly this fact had little if any influence on my feelings about the property. We took a cab to and from the train station on our arrival and departure with our luggage, rode the bus the other four days we were there, and never had any transportation issues.

We were in Florence as tourists, and would depart the hotel in mid morning and not return until late at night. The purpose of our use of the property was to sleep and bathe. By the end of the week we were dreading returning to what I began to refer to as "our cell."

Walking up the short street from the bus stop one day I remarked to Mrs. dwcatty that the exterior architecture of the property reminded me of a prison guard tower. The prison theme continued with the buzzing sound that emanated from the room’s door latch after we unlocked it with the key, and the lowering of the electronic blackout curtain over the window gave the room the feel of a bomb shelter. To be fair, the blackout curtain performed its function remarkably well.

The room’s interior design was gulag inspired. The walls were solid white and completely devoid of art. All the horizontal surfaces were glass, with brushed metallic supports. There were three small safe deposit box sized drawers, two on short stands on either side of the bed and the third under the glass topped table opposite the bed. The bed itself was on a raised platform with sharp corners at the feet and was open underneath. The floor was wood with not a single piece of carpet. The entire décor was, I became convinced, designed so that I could not conceal the tools for my escape.

The bath can be best described as functional. The proximity of the toilet to the short, half glass wall next to the shower left no room for modesty. You had to reach through the shower cascade to adjust the water, so that you might either scald or freeze your arm as you attempted to regulate the temperature before climbing into the shower. The side wall of the tub was the highest I think I have ever seen, and while the huge shower head was delightful, the half glass wall did not prevent water from puddling on the bathroom floor. The sink basin was larger than the 19” wall mounted TV (the only thing on the bed room walls) and must have required running 2 gallons to get the water 2” deep to shave.

There was what we thought at first was a nice feature in the entry way in that there was an overhead light that turned on automatically when you entered the room with your key; however there was no switch for this light, it simply turned itself off after about 30 seconds. Thus when I left the room early one morning while Mrs. dwcatty was still asleep, both the door buzzer and automatic light conspired to disturb her slumber on my return, no matter how quiet I might have been. The room’s light switches may have made sense, although after five days we had little success in figuring out what that might have been.

As a Diamond member I was given a code for free wi-fi. We discovered that the only place we could get the most minimal signal to use our tablet was sitting on the toilet; there was no signal in the bedroom area. When using the hotel’s washer and dryer one morning I took the tablet with me to use while I waited on the laundry, however there was no signal in the basement.

We packed light this trip as we rode the train twice between cities and did not want to have to lug oversized suitcases. The washer was such a small size that we had to do three loads of laundry rather than two. While the desk clerks told me they would add a charge to our room for the special coins needed to use the washer and dryer, they did not say how much and it was my fault that I did not ask. I was later surprised at checkout to discover they were 5 Euro each; thus it cost 10 Euro for me to run a load of laundry. For that price they could have washed and folded my clothes for me. (I later discovered this was the going rate for laundry at HGIs in Italy, but at the time of checkout in Florence this was just another antagonizing occurrence.)

The front desk clerks we encountered were uneven in their responses and attitudes. While a few were helpful and gracious, others were smug. We had just left the Molino Stucky in Venice where every person we dealt with, from the doorman to the gift shop clerk to the folks restocking the executive lounge bent over backwards to make our stay enjoyable. In Florence we felt like we were being merely tolerated.

The entire hotel, from the exterior appearance to the staff to the room had a sterile, unwelcoming feel to it. We did not like being in the room, we did not look forward to coming back to the property at night, and ultimately we were glad to depart. This may have been the least enjoyable stay I have ever had at a Hilton property.