Stayed here for two nights on a trip down the Californian coast as we live Disneyland and were keen to finally see the new Star Wars area of the park. The last few times in Anaheim we had stayed at the Hilton and were hoping that this Hyatt might be a better choice but unfortunately it wasn’t. We were lured by the pictures of the newly renovated guest rooms and forked out extra for one of these rooms. Being Globalists with Hyatt, we received an “upgrade” on the app prior to arrival but it turned out to be a poisoned benefit as the “suite” was one of the old unrenovated ones, facing into the interior lobby courtyard (very very weird) and featured all you’d expect from a room of that age: scratched furniture, gloomy dark lightening throughout, stains on the sofa (yikes- when I see those stains I always wonder if they still offer in room “adult movies” for the lonely business traveler kind of crowd?) and even one of those horrid over-bath showers with a plastic curtain, the horror!

Service at reception was also really bad, slow and unwelcoming- we did not even arrive during rush hour as we saw worse queues at other times but the complete lack of friendliness or interest in providing customer service was most notable. We did receive our free Globalist breakfast at least but even that we had to enquire about first and at least ordering amenities like bathrobes worked a treat on the Hyatt app (which is not the case necessarily at other Hyatt properties as we discovered later in our trip) so I’ll give them that.

To add insult to injury, we discovered later that we got literally spammed by those annoying meaningless automated emails from the “hotel manager” sleazing about welcoming us and, of course, afterwards wanting their god-forsaken NPS score. To make things worse, they came from a sender weirdly called “AEdelmann” which surely would get even the tamest spam filter getting a hiccup (why would you do something so silly???). This experience showed exactly why I hate these automated “service messages” so much: they are entirely useless and strangely meant to replace proper service at the property itself. Well, they don’t- rather to the contrary.

Lastly, the so-called adult pool has a two hour adult time after the sun goes down and is otherwise filled with screaming kids. Not something of a big surprise here at Disney but given that, we actually enjoyed the much bigger pool at the Hilton more. The Hyatt is also about twice as far from the park which pushes it just over the edge for a nice walk back and forth while the “resort shuttle” outrageously wants to charge extra so a Lyft or Uber turned out almost the same price and we didn’t have to share it with hordes of unruly children. All in all, we’ll stay at the Hilton again next time instead which I’d a shame as this hotel would otherwise have potential.