This review is for a stay back in August. Buckle up, this one is longer than typical. Oy vey, what a bad experience.

Booking & Check In
Booked directly on hyatt.com with cash for a Standard King. When we showed up things set a pretty bad tone and never fully recovered. We drove up to the valet which was overwhelmed and there was basically zero space left anywhere up and down the street to put cars. They were a bit frantic when we pulled up and not impressed that we had luggage and you know...needed a moment to unload the car. Furthering the stress was that luggage carts were in short supply, and when I asked hotel staff for suggestions I was criticized for arriving while it’s busy and given zero help. We took to stalking other guests to eventually get a cart.

Once we got the car sorted things didn’t improve with check in at the front desk. It was a hasty check-in process without any explanation of Globalist benefits or any real welcome, which was surprising given that unlike the valet, the front desk was not busy at all. To add insult to injury, we quickly unloaded our cart upstairs and returned it to the lobby to try to help them with the shortage -- but instead of a thank you I was told I needed to take it to another elevator bank to return it to a different storage area. I don’t mean to sound entitled, but numerous hotel staff were standing around doing nothing.

Hotel & location
On the plus side, the hard product is nice. It’s a fairly standard situation as other new Centrics, but I do like the brand's hard product. I know it’s repetitive, but it’s still clean & modern. The location is also good, right in the middle of Center City near all the action.

Room
The room was decent overall. I don’t love that the water closet is a sliding door that leaves you craving the privacy offered by a door that actually shuts fully. But the only real issue we had with the room was that A/C was unable to keep up with the heat wave. On the plus side the room was very quiet despite being in the middle of a major city.

Service
Unfortunately the service didn’t improve after our disappointing check in. Housekeeping never answered the phone so we’d call the front desk, which seemed very annoyed with us each time. Then we’d get the wrong things delivered to our room anyway.

We tried the breakfast a few times, and something always went wrong. Delivery of simple orders took over an hour (despite expectations being set for far less time). Attempts to call to order or check order status were never answered. I realize staffing is tough in the era of Covid, but they seemed appropriately staffed. Multiple people were clearly employed working in the restaurant, and there were typically 1-2 parties max getting table service. The food was also pretty disappointing.

Valet wasn’t any better. First off, they use an electronic system instead of paper tickets, which seems convenient, but it never worked. We could never request the car successfully via their chatbot, and they literally never answered the phone once. So each time we needed our car we had to go to the valet desk in the garage to request it, and there’d be 2-3 employees just hanging out. It typically took 20+ minutes to get the car.

But wait...there’s more. During check out, we went through the various motions to finally get our car from the valet, only to discover that our car was clearly damaged. Fortunately my wife noticed before we left, but when we tried to tell the valet driver he said “I didn’t do that” and literally ran away. We made our way to the back office and were lucky enough that a manager was on duty. He provided by far the best service we experienced during this hotel stay. While it’s obviously very annoying to have the car damage to deal with, he was polite, gave us the benefit of the doubt, reviewed tapes quickly to figure out what happened, and held our hand through the claims process.

All that said, despite the manager handling things well, at the end of the day while the valet company did cover the damages, it was a pita. As you could imagine, the valet company’s claims department is not the most communicative group of service professionals you’ll ever meet. I was lucky that our next destination was my parents house in the rural midwest, which meant it was easy to find a body shop that would easily come in below the estimate limits that the valet company would probably fight back against.

Conclusion
Alright, I know that was long, but this hotel basically swung and missed on every front for us. I’m glad I have a hundred other nights in hotels this past year to remind me of the way things should be, because otherwise this hotel might have gaslit me into believing this experience was somehow my fault.
I will give the hotel credit for following up with me after I provided this feedback to their standard survey requests. It was a very polite apology and they gave me some Hyatt points.