Pretty sure all of these are mentioned in one way or another, but posted anyway to +1 them:
The good
- Hilton Garden Inns. To me HGI strikes the perfect chord, (nearly) every one is up to expectations, and I actively look to stay in these when they're available at a reasonable cost.
- iPhone app has improved especially in the last few months with the addition of Google maps to the room selection and the introduction of digital key.
- The fact that you (HHonorsRepresentative) are here in this forum and helping people out.
Areas for improvement
- Breakfast. Very inconsistent within the brand as evidenced by the 1400+ post thread here. Hot breakfast should be a standard benefit for diamond.
- San Francisco full service properties (specifically Hilton Union Square and Parc 55) seem to have an ongoing race to the bottom between the two to see which can offer the least breakfast and get away with it. Within the last year, "grab and go" stations have appeared which are hardly "continental breakfast," golds can no longer "upgrade" to hot breakfast for $10, and there are even recent indications that at least one property is doing away with the "upgrade" fee of $10 for diamonds and instead giving a "credit" meaning a hot breakfast is more like $25. With all full service Marriotts in the area having lounges which have hot breakfast, it's difficult to stay loyal to Hilton when traveling mostly to San Francisco, and I nearly abandoned Hilton at the end of last year because of this.
- Upgrades: maybe I'm just unlucky, need to be more aggressive, or need to wear a blazer when checking in, but I've never seen a suite.
- Website: I'm biased here because I work in tech, but having your site down for several hours each weekend to do upgrades shouldn't be needed with any kind of reasonably modern infrastructure. You don't need the latest cutting edge to achieve continuous uptime; even circa 2010 designs can accomplish this.
- Internet: This is one area where Hilton is pretty consistent, unfortunately, and it's consistently bad. It looks to me like there's really weird routing (sorry, techie here) and some properties have insufficient bandwidth. You're apparently routing all of the internet traffic via a provider the central US - IMHO time to dump Wayport/AT&T and get a network service provider who knows what they're doing.
Dreaming
- Twitter support, similar to Delta's twitter support, who can resolve actual problems and are responsive (order of minutes; an hour max).
- Waive resort fees for diamonds, since nearly everything in the resort fee is supposed to be a diamond benefit anyway.
- A direct e-mail contact address for each property that's readily findable and answered.
- If you don't do consistent hot diamond breakfast, make each hotel post their diamond breakfast benefit right there on the website, to obviate the need for the 1400+ post thread and ensure that we are getting the latest, up-to-date information. Or maybe this is just viewable to diamonds when signed in to book. "Your on-property benefits at this hotel will be: ..."