FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - W South Beach, Miami Beach [Master Thread]
Old Mar 10, 2018 | 1:32 pm
  #832  
gooselee
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Here now. Check in was a bit of a mess...lobby was swamped and line out the door around 1pm Friday, and as expected our room was not ready but the bell staff happily took our things and we grabbed lunch. After that we wanted to change clothes but the hospitality suite wasn't available...we were directed to the lobby restroom to change which was not really ideal. Floor was pretty disgusting and there are no hooks, surfaces, anything in the stalls to place anything. At least the stall itself was big enough to maneuver in.

Finally got a text just before 4pm that our room was ready. Back to the now even longer line. Informed that we were "upgraded" from the Oasis suite to Mega. I think there was a comment in this thread about them trying to do this so I asked if I could just keep the Oasis I booked, as I knew the Mega was in fact smaller (and it's cooler/cloudy this weekend, so wasn't expecting to use the plunge pool). In return, I received a pretty hard sell on how special and unique the Mega was, so I agreed to take keys for it and check it out, with a promise that I could switch rooms if I didn't like it.

Mega Suite is basically what you'd expect from the website photos. All six of them are in a row on the 6th floor overlooking the (moderately noisy) pool and being overlooked by the main hotel tower (so not a ton of privacy on the balcony). Bellman who brought our bags up commented that the dining table was missing (?) but he'd send one up if we wanted. Overall a nice room, but as we suspected it was not what we wanted for this trip. So, call to the front desk to revert to Oasis...finally we are told we were upgraded because they had no Oasis suites available this weekend. No apology, no offer of another room, no attempt for service recovery...nothing. The entire attitude from check in to this point was that we should be overjoyed st having been upgraded to a smaller room on a lower floor (at the beach check-in while we were waiting for our room, we found out we had actually been preassigned to an Oasis suite on the 11th floor...I'm assuming they displaced us then up sold someone else to that room). Asked for late checkout to compensate (I had already asked our Insider via email and was given a generic non-committal answer) - denied with "all our check outs are 11am".

Also our phone kept ringing all evening and morning but only two or three times at a call and never a message. I'm guessing it was our Insider trying to welcome us.

The line staff (bell, door, restaurants) is great and the property is fine for a big, middle-aged, W property. But management/front desk could use some training has GOT to stop forcing people who have booked specific suites into rooms they don't want, especially when they're asking $1k+ a night for some of these rooms.

We're still having a fun weekend but I'm somewhat regretting spending double the *points to receive a suite I didn't want. Will certainly not be back to this property and wouldn't recommend it to others at this point.
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