Well, I finally had a chance to stay at this new Hyatt Place, and "cheaply built" is accurate. These people cut corners everywhere a corner could be cut. Hard to believe this can be flagged as a Hyatt Place.
The rooms are small, really small. How small? There is no wet bar area, so all that counter space is gone. There is no counter in the tiny bathroom, only the lip around the sink, so that counter space is gone too. I have stayed in other HPs with that sink before, but those were in much larger rooms with space elsewhere. These rooms are so small that there isn't even room to place that end table (with the blanket) next to the couch. Instead it has to go over by the bathroom door. Which means if I sit on the couch there is no place even to set my Coke can.
The amount of noise coming in through the HVAC vents was really intrusive, and I did NOT have a room on the freeway side. I could hear every "beep, beep" of a truck backing up outside. I stay in a lot of hotels so I think I am a good judge of an acceptable level of quietness in the room, and this was bad. The room was completely unusable to get any work done in the room.
Some people complain the old Amersuites conversions had small rooms. Well, I've stayed in those but I've never seen a HP with rooms as small as this new one. Essentially, this is a Holiday Inn Express, but with the horrible Hyatt Place breakfast.
I read this article and now I think Delano is how bad new HPs will be:
Hyatt Place Launches New Features
"including one room prototype that’s 15 percent smaller than existing standard rooms."
The article sounds like the braintrust running Hyatt believes they can lessen the construction costs, take out the carpeting and offset it with bigger TVs and other such bullcrap. Ever stayed in a hotel room without carpeting? It's
loud.
So this is worse than just one bad HP. Hyatt is going to start building new hotels with these unusable rooms, and eventually I'll have to write off HPs, because otherwise I'd have to research each HP beforehand to make sure it does not have these new rooms.