I forgot to post more about my March 2022 stay earlier but this thread just got bumped. Anyway, reading the report by
escape4 from March 2020 it was basically the same.
The hotel again had facade renovations and was closed until mid-Feb 2022, so the exterior looked beautiful. The weather was perfect for our whole trip, maybe just a bit windy on the first morning. Only issue was that the hotel pool was closed for maintenance, but this meant we didn't need to bring swimming stuff and avoided checking a bag on the flights.
We didn't get a suite probably because I paid with points and the hotel would have received very little reimbursement from Hilton, but they did give me the level below which is King Exec with Sea View. This is at the end of the corridor and comes with a huge terrace, much bigger than the terrace of the suite. As mentioned before the water pressure in the shower is horrible, this is something they should really fix, everything else was good.
As mentioned in my post from Jan 2022, I booked for 1 adult and they didn't say anything about the 2nd adult, even though the price was 4000 points per night higher when booking for 2. Of course I did have to pay the small city tax of 14kn/night for both adults. There is no lounge breakfast because you can't book a rate without breakfast.
The hotel offers airport transfers in their car for 400 kuna. The official shuttle bus is 80 kuna return per person, and in March, it was like our own private van (but if you come as part of a big group and want to use their service in off-peak times, you had better contact the operator in advance).
The airport shuttle arrival point is at Ploče Gate which means dragging your luggage across the old town to the hotel, not a problem in March when there is barely anyone around and it isn't hot. The driver's English was not good and he didn't understand (or pretended not to understand) when we tried to get him to drive on to the hotel. The departure point is near the cable car station, it may be easier to take public bus 1 to the main bus station to start there, as the shuttle driver didn't stop anywhere on the way to the airport and the van had no markings indicating it was the airport service. It ran exactly to the website timetable. In August they just run a bus whenever it fills up, and you probably won't get on the first one - so if the hotel car is available you had better take that or die walking up the hill in the heat.
The lounge offering was similar to the pics from March 2020, times are 3-5pm for cakes and 6-8pm for alcohol and small snacks. My son did not like the cream on the cakes and on the second day they put out some cakes with no cream, which was a nice gesture if it was because they noticed he scraped off the cream. We were the only people in the lounge every afternoon. On evening 1 my son wanted to sleep at 6pm so I went to the lounge to do work, full selection of alcohol was out, but the canapes were disappointing. There was something meant to be garlic bread but it was so charred that more than 50% of it was black, not sure why they even put it out. The other offerings were 1cm cubes of beef / potato / fish / vegetables. A group of Americans decided to stand at opposite ends and talk across the whole lounge about their special holiday.
Based on this we skipped the lounge on the remaining evenings and went into the town to eat. Maybe it's a tourist trap but the restaurant Portun, which is the first one you see when walking into the main street from the hotel, was really very good, portions were huge and not that expensive. We did try some other restaurants which were further back inside the town, they were not as good.
Breakfast was excellent, they changed some of the buffet items every day so it didn't get boring. While there is no menu, you can order almost anything you might normally have in a European breakfast from the kitchen, all sorts of interesting dishes were constantly coming out. As they weren't super busy / rushed everyone was very eager to serve.
We had the whole city walls to ourselves for 2 hours. We did a boat trip to one of the islands for 40 kuna, and a taxi up to the summit of Srđ was 150 kuna, cheaper than the cable car would have been for 2 people (though it was closed until 1 April). It was not too hot to walk back down - though the direct path with stations of the cross is very rocky, there is an easier route via the village of Bosanka. The only real downside of going in March is that you have to change planes in Zagreb and if you want to go to Split or somewhere else the only real option is via Zagreb again. Nonetheless, very happy that I paid fewer points for this 5* hotel than I'm paying for below average UK doubletrees this summer...
