Just completed an overnight stay at this Hyatt before our morning flight home to the US. It was mostly nice, with a couple highlights and a couple not-highlights.

We were traveling as a family, with our cohort of kids whose ages range from “barely aged out of lap-infant status” to teenager. We stayed in a loft suite, as well as two connecting “high floor” but otherwise standard rooms.

Cash rates were just over €200/night during our stay, and we booked with points.

TL;DR: A good option on either side of a flight, with comfortable, fun rooms and largely nice staff. Skip the cocktail lounge in the weird (but kind of cool) dome on top.



The Highlights


Pool & Lounge Staff

In both places the staff was exceptional.

In the pool, the staff went out of their way to make sure our kids were having a good time, bringing out inflatable toys, checking on us frequently and even offering to let us stay after closing time. “They’re having so much fun, that’s what it’s for!”

In the lounge, the staff did an excellent job of keeping things tidy, and helping guests out even when things were crowded, and some guests were behaving poorly (more on that later).


The 2-Floor Suite

One of our rooms was one of the unique suites that’s split into 2-levels, on the 25th floor. The top loft level has a windowed ceiling at a 45° angle that offers really fun views. Not quite the Hyatt Regency Paris’ breathtaking view of the Eiffel Tower, but still a fun room with fun views.

Feels like someplace that James Bond would stay.

Normal Rooms

The normal rooms were quite nice as well. Comfy beds. Good views. Nice large bathrooms and much bigger than the average European hotel room.

The Lounge Food & Drink

We made it for the 5-7PM “Tapas Hour” and the tapas were quite good. AKA, I would have been pleased to get them at a tapas bar where I was paying for them.

I’m always impressed with a “self serve” liquor selection, something that seems relatively common in European airport and hotel lounges, but is unheard of in America. There was a good selection out during Tapas hours, with a suggested Negroni recipe. There was also a good wine selection (2ea options for red, white and sparkling), and beer (a local brand whose name I can’t remember, offered in normal, and non-alcoholic versions).

And like I mentioned earlier, the staff did a great job of keeping things fresh and clean.

Overall, upgrading to a room with club access or using a club certificate could be a good value for the right price. You could easily skip dinner (we did) in lieu of lounge snacks, particularly if you follow the local “big lunch” custom.

We left too early to have breakfast, so no report there.

Proximity to the Airport

Our Sunday AM taxi to the airport (ordered by the hotel on our behalf) came right on time, cost €23 (surcharges for the number of passengers and I believe airport drop-off) and took exactly 7-minutes. I expect you could plan for longer during busier times.

I suppose an easy metro connection would be nice, but you can’t have everything.


The Not-especially-Highlights

Globalist Recognition

Not exceptional but also not exceptionally poor. My status was mentioned on checkin, and we were given details of the lounge.

We’d booked one suite with points, but the poor receptionist was so overwhelmed figuring out the details of our 3 rooms that I didn’t have the heart to ask her about a suite-upgrade for either of the non-suite rooms. Upgrade-eligible suites were showing as available in the app though.

We got nice glass bottles of water, small chocolates and (uniquely) a mini-bottle of olive oil as welcome gifts in the rooms.

Nothing to complain about, but also not on the level of the Hyatt Regency Paris we stayed at last year that set the high-water mark for globalist recognition.

Didn’t inquire about breakfast options since we had to leave for our flights before either the lounge or restaurant opened.

Room Occupancy Limits & Connecting Options

If this Hyatt has any rooms that accommodate more than 2-guests, they hid them from us.

While this is quite normal at many European hotels, most of them have the excuse of small rooms, often in historical properties. This Hyatt’s rooms are quite large (by European standards) and could have easily fit 2-doubles.

Neither my globalist concierge nor the on-site staff were able to get us a room that connects to a suite either, despite (as far as I could tell) basically every room type bing bookable the night of our stay.

As a result, we weren’t able to fit our family in a room with connecting suite (like we typically can), and had to get 3-rooms, with one separated by a floor.

Not likely relevant to most of you, but perhaps to other ridiculously large families like ours.

Large Families In the Lounge, for Two Sides

Small rant ahead warning. In summary: there were lots of other families with young kids in the lounge besides ours. Some were incredibly well behaved. Others were not.

I recognize that I am absolutely the pot calling the kettle black here. Or like one of those people who need to be reminded, “you’re not in traffic, you are traffic.”

We bring our kids into “adult environments” like lounges and nice restaurants, and work hard to teach them how to behave like adults in those environments and not disturb other guests. We typically do pretty Ok, and if it’s a bad day and not working, we leave because we’re not entitled to ruin the experience for other guests.

There were several other (American) families with 3+ kids in the lounge at the same time as us, who annoyed me on two fronts.

On the one end of the spectrum was one of the best-behaved pack of siblings I’ve ever seen. Like I said, we pride ourselves on having well-behaved kids, but these parents were putting us to shame. Their daughters in matching dresses sat quietly and politely at their table, making conversation, and when they got up to get a snack or a drink, moved around the lounge like graceful little polite ballerinas.

Enough to make you sick.

We play a game with our kids when we travel that for every 10 compliments they get on their behavior from strangers, they get ice cream. I usually have to pay out once or twice on a big trip like the one we’re currently on. (We obviously get ice cream at other times because I’m not a monster, but these are special bonus ice creams).

Clearly this family didn’t have the same arrangement, because the kids would have had been obese and diabetic from all the ice cream, and the parents would have been broke from buying it.

Then there was the family who came into the lounge at the other end of the spectrum. The classic “we’re going to let our toddler destroy the lounge and totally ignore her” family. Essentially making the case for the “kids shouldn’t be allowed in here” crowd.

The toddler ran around the whole lounge completely unsupervised. Pulled flowers out of vases. Did ninja maneuvers onto the couches of unsuspecting guests. Dribbling a steady trail of cracker bits behind her as she went. Of course, her behavior was nothing out of the ordinary for a toddler, but her parents did nothing to moderate it.

If Hyatt ever ends up banning kids from their lounges, I’m blaming this family (and others like them).

Which is a very long way of saying that there were quite a few families with kids in the lounge during our stay at the end of June. I expect this is a busy holiday travel weekend for families, but if you were hoping for a professional quiet environment, you wouldn’t have found it.

Insulting Service at the Cocktail Lounge

My wife and I wanted to check out the rooftop geodesic dome that sits on top of the hotel. We went up to have a drink at around 8 PM on Saturday night. The dome has more of a club atmosphere than what I would think of as a cocktail bar atmosphere, and only about 1/3 of the space and seats were occupied.

We ordered drinks from the bar, and then asked if we could take a table on the next level down. The server for that area gave us the once over and said no, it’s not possible because we were wearing shorts.

That’s fine. Dresscodes are great, but as we turned around to go back to have our drinks at the bar, I noticed that at literally the next table over from the one we’d hoped to sit at was another guest wearing shorts.

When I tried to ask the server about this, he blatantly and pointedly (standing two feet away from me) ignored me. I asked the bartender who was mixing our drinks, and she seemed confused, went over and talked to the server, and then came back and said sorry, there weren’t any available tables (there were about 10 empty tables in that section).

I asked about the shorts rule once more, and got the impression that if I’d pressed the issue we could have gotten a table. But I don’t enjoy bickering with staff or conflict. So I made it into a joke with the bartender and asked her to give her colleague a hard time for me. We finished our (€20+/ea) overpriced and over-sweet cocktails quickly at the bar, and left.

It was such a strange encounter. My honest guess it that the waiter just didn’t want more people in his section, and made his excuse without remembering that he already had a guest there wearing shorts. Or was just having a bad day and wanted to give someone a metaphorical finger. Or maybe I look like the guy that ran over his dog.

Even without the insult, I’d probably skip the rooftop bar. The dome is old. The sound system was running at club-level volume when we got there, but then started crackling and went out during our brief stay. If I could have my Euros back in exchange for not checking it out, I’d happily take that trade. Maybe go up and take a look, but I’d skip the cocktail menu for sure.

Overall Take

A quite nice place to have a soft landing after, or before a flight. Not a destination I’d seek out, but a hotel I’d be happy to stay in again.

A little too far out (30+ minutes by metro) from most of the city’s sights for me to choose for anything longer.