I risked a stay and suite upgrade here...and I won. Then I lost.

My stay here at the JW Marriott Austin has been a bit of a revelation. I now understand precisely how and why the JW Marriott brand fails to deliver as a luxury brand while still offering a nice but still uneven product.

A more thorough review will follow, but...

The pros:

(1) Upgraded beyond my SNA cleared Executive Corner Suite to the one Presidential Suite. It’s a truly beautiful suite with lots of well thought out spaces, wonderful views, furnishings, and just an overall nice suite. I call it corporate boardroom chic in design style.

(2) Nice location.

(3) Lots of food/beverage outlets and options.

(4) There is an Executive Lounge.

(5) Staff try to please.

(6) I was given 2 pm late checkout despite this being convention hotel.

(7) After air con fail, they did eventually get the suite bedroom to below 67 F as originally requested and promised. (It actually got as cold as 62 F!)

There the good news ended.

The cons:

(1) The air con wasn’t working at all in the suite bedroom despite reiterating that priority several days in advance—even going so far as to decline an upgrade is the lower tier room had better air con. It actually took several calls to ge the engineering team to resolve it properly. They actually first came and left without ever having done anything at all.

(2) The lobby is a zoo. The check in is a zoo. The entrance is a zoo. Nothing luxury about any of those.

(3) The elevators are slow and don’t come as often as they should. And one of the 3 elevators to the top floors didn’t seem to be working at all. These made the elevator area sometimes a zoo, too.

(4) Room service breakfast took almost an hour despite being promised in 35 min or less. The waffle was lukewarm at best. It had pecans despite a request for no pecans. The coffee was dreadful. They did comp the breakfast, thankfully.

(5) Calling any department requires being put on hold for at least a few minutes, sometimes as long as 7 minutes. Everyone seems to need to check with someone else, making me wait even longer. Sometimes, I’d call and it would put me on hold music for several minutes before someone picked up. Nothing luxury about that.

(6) No special welcome amenity with welcome note of any sort was waiting in room or delivered. I asked about it this morning and manager was surprised it didn’t get delivered last night. He said it would be delivered at noon...and it’s 12:30 pm and nothing yet.

(7) There is no phone in the Presidential Suite bedroom. Seriously! The only phone is in the living room on the desk. To call that stupid and inconvenient is an understatement.

(8) The Executive Lounge that offers the complimentary Plat breakfast benefit is only open from 6-9 am. I don’t use lounges, anyway. But I find that 9 am closing time surprisingly early for breakfast. At least 10:00-10:30 am seems more reasonable.

(9) Despite the 2 pm late checkout and the Do Not Disturb in the door, a housekeeper knocked on my door at 11 am. I was pretty irritated.


I’m glad I tried a JW. But there’s no question that the large room count makes for a unsatisfactory luxury experience by any measure. I now understand why I have always preferred W, even with its quirks. W room count is almost always much lower than this JW or most JWs IME. Service is vastly better with fewer rooms, and W service is almost always vastly superior to the service I’ve experienced here.