offerendum

Both nice hotels, if letting the Dorchester-problem out both would be my choice too. Not sure if outdoor pool in Florence will be open but you can use the pretty big outdoor whirlpool. I don´t have a proper picture but tried to mark it.

sophialite

I prefer JK Place Rome and FS Florence. Easy choice.

nealsense

Thanks so much - super helpful. Let me check those out. One quick question - how come no one suggested St. Regis in Rome?

m0hamed

The StR doesn’t have a pool.

SojournsOf

And the location (for me) leaves quite a bit to be desired.

DonJ

Hi we are planning a trip to Rome and I am torn between:

• JK Place
• Portrait Suites
• Fendi Suites
• Hotel de la Ville
• Hotel Eden

Not having stayed at any of these in Rome, which one would you recommend?

Best
DonJ

sophialite

I’ve done JK Place, Portrait and Fendi Suites.

Interestingly Fendi Suites is run by JK Place.

Fendi Suites wasn’t good. The hard product is high quality, but the rooms actually aren’t that large for the price. And the service is almost non-existent. There is housekeeping, but front desk is rude. Breakfast restaurant is decent, and because it’s a pretty cool place to hang out at night, there are queues to enter the building in the evenings that you have to wade through to get to the hotel. Never again.

Portrait is owned by JK Place. Basically same vibe for both it and JK Place. 5 star boutique hotel that feels more like a home than a hotel. For me, JK Place is spectacular. One of my favorite brands in the world. You get lots of attention and service, high quality product, etc. because the hotels are so small, you need to book well in advance (and IIRC JK Place Capri is pretty selective, generally favoring repeat clients).

My only gripe with JK Place is that the rooms are small for the price, and you need to shell out a lot to get a room with a decent amount of spaces. But on the other hand I’m 3/3 on free upgrades through my concierge.

livefromtuscany

it really depends what you are looking for?

The first 3 are small boutique hotels, more personal and more intimate. Add the Hotel Vilon, which is my favorite in Rome.

The other 2 are much larger grand hotels with lots of facilities.

All are good and conveniently located.

Of the 5 you listed, I’d take the JK or the de la Ville.

Condition One

How does the Hotel Hassler stack up? Going with an 82 year old (in spectacular health) this fall, so want to be in a good location for sightseeing. Not sure if the Hassler fits the bill, but it looks good on Google Maps

offerendum

Location is good, no question. You have to walk the Spanish Steps but there is even an elevator. You will not find a hotel in Rome which is located in a way you can reach everything easily by foot. It's a huge city. Didn't stay there but had dinner at their restaurant which was great.

Pausanias

I know the Hassler. It's my personal choice among the grande dame hotels of Rome, mainly because it is privately owned and not part of a chain. You do need to be careful in choosing your room as some can be on the small side. The rooftop restaurant is old-school gorgeous. No hotel has an ideal location in Rome so you need to prioritise your sightseeing and choose something vaguely convenient. Hopefully your 82-year-old is up for walking a lot because public transport and traffic generally is chaotic, to say the least. For me, I go for the pagan Ancient Rome sites, not the Renaissance/Vatican side of things, much less the shopping, and the Hassler is certainly close to the latter. From the Hassler you can trip and fall down the Spanish Steps and land battered and bruised in Gucci. My other hotel choices are the Palazzo Manfredi which has a simply staggering view of the Colosseum and the Raphael which is close to Rome's finest square oblong, the Piazza Navona.

Condition One

Thanks for all the advice! Doesn't look like I can go wrong with any of them. My friend will have no major issues with walking or getting up/down the Spanish Steps - he's been training since lockdown last year!

BLV

No love for Portrait Suites? I’m a big fan of their sister property in Florence.

jbb

I had a good experience at the Hotel Eden a few years back when it had been recently fully renovated. Genuine European luxury with professional service and a nice roof-top restaurant overlooking the Villa Borghese park. High quality hard product that you'd expect from a top-end European city hotel. My only issue was that their concierge, while seemingly good, gave us some restaurant recommendations we didn't end up loving and the guide he arranged for us wasn't great.

hardestadt

I have just spent 9 nights at the St. Regis Rome and while the hotel is absolutely gorgeous, the service was so hilariously bad at times, that I thought I’d leave my first ever review as a warning to other forum members, since I have benefited a lot from your collective expertise over the years.

Let me provide some context. My wife and I are both in our late 30s and prior to the pandemic used to travel for leisure a few times a year, staying at luxury hotels, but mostly opting for smaller rooms, not the grand suites. Unlike some of the frequent contributors here, we prefer our interactions with hotels to be pretty “light touch” – i.e. no detailed pre-arrival lists or personal communications with GMs. The stay in Rome was the first leg of a 3-week trip, which also included a sojourn at La Bandita in Pienza (not really luxury, but a delightful hotel nevertheless) followed by a stay at The Gritti Palace in Venice (excellent all around).

Due to the pandemic, we had to reschedule our trip two times, and in the process, I switched my original Roman booking from JK Place to the St. Regis to avail of a Noble Stay promotion. Good thing we got a good deal through Noble, as I would have been much more annoyed, if we were to pay their current EUR 800+ per night rates.

The good

First, let me give credit where it is due: the public areas of the hotel are spectacularly beautiful and we really like the room design – luxurious, but not gaudy, and with a great sense of place. Overall, we thought that Pierre-Yves Rochon did an amazing job with the hard product. The room we were given overlooked the secluded inner courtyard. We must have been upgraded to an Imperial Room, since it had a large walk-in closet separated from the bedroom by a fairly long corridor – an unusual, but perfectly usable configuration. No issues with the room other than a broken bathroom door, which was fixed when we mentioned it to our butler. We also had pleasant interactions with the St Regis’s concierge team, which helped us with a few restaurant bookings, and bartenders at Lumen, which were cheerful, friendly and responsive. No one from the butler team ever bothered to proactively introduce themselves, but the few interactions we had with individual butlers were pleasant. I also noticed some attempts to make the stay special (little piece of chocolate at turn down one day, and a farewell gift left in the room prior to check out), but they could not compensate for the inconsistent service.

The bad

Check in. A hotel has only one chance to make a first impression, and our stay at the St Regis began on a weak note. We arrived at around 7pm after a long and tiresome train ride from Malpensa, and were looking forward to a relaxing evening at the hotel. St Regis had all the ingredients to awe us, but never made the effort.

Due to Covid regulations the main entrance was closed, so we were ushered in through a side door into a small and somewhat claustrophobic area with the concierges’ desk and the front desk. The immediate impression was that of a severely understaffed operation: we and another couple had to wait for the only check-in officer on duty to show up while a concierge was taking photocopies of our documents. The check-in officer, when she finally arrived, was professional but clearly overworked, so the experience felt extremely rushed: no small talk to put us at ease, no explanation of how our daily F&B credit was supposed to work, no questions about our choice of a standard Bonvoy amenity, no tour of the hotel – we were registered, escorted to the nearby elevator and that was it. There was no greeting in the room or any sort of welcome gift.

Now I understand that the hotel might have been busy, but really this could have been handled much better with minimal effort: just ask your guests to wait in a gorgeous (and completely empty at that time of the day) lobby and bring a cup of water/coffee/tea – that is all it takes!

Dining: Knowing that in many tourist destinations in Italy one has to do his homework to avoid disappointment, I made lunch or dinner arrangements for every single day of our stay, other than our first night, since I assumed that the hotel restaurant Lumen would be at least decent. I assumed wrongly, as it ended up being by far the worst meal of the whole trip. At the time of our stay the St Regis had only one dinner option – the Lumen Garden – an all-day casual dining establishment located in the small inner courtyard. When we arrived at 7:30pm, it was packed full and understaffed (a common pattern). No one was there to greet guests, so we had to look for a waiter to get us a table. When I approached one, I saw another guest loudly complaining that their table was not getting any service – a sign of things to come! Indeed, one had to chase indifferent waiters to get the menu and then chase them again to place the order, the options include such Italian “classics” as Caesar Salad (EUR26) and Club Sandwich (EUR28), and the overall vibe was of a place that advertises “menu turistico” to hapless travelers just off their cruise ship. What a mess! Since this was our first trip to Rome, I thought that maybe this was the unfortunate state of most hotel restaurants in the city, but no – Hotel de Russie’s Le Jardin offered a gorgeous setting and competent cuisine, while Hassler‘s Imŕgo was simply in a different league.

The ugly

Service: The day after our arrival the hotel left a message in our room explaining that we could avail of the free unpacking service – now that was a piece of information we would have appreciated the day before! A more serious problem was that the housekeeping failed to replace still water bottles unless prodded, which eventually led to a total service collapse: we returned to our room after a long day of sightseeing to find that not only did the housekeeping fail to replace the free water bottles, they did not even bother to place any in the minibar.

I called the room service and asked for the still water to be replenished. Half an hour later a confused lady with a tray of (someone else’s) food showed up at the door. Fifteen minutes after that a busboy appeared with several bottles of sparkling water and was very annoyed when we explained that we were asking for still water. At this point I decided to try my luck with the butler service. No one picks up the phone! When I finally got the room service on the line, the gentleman on the other side told me he couldn’t take my order, but would call me back. This was the closest I ever was to checking out of the hotel on the spot! Fortunately for the St. Regis, instead of walking out we decided to try our luck at the bar where sympathetic and friendly bartenders managed to somewhat diffuse the situation and save the night. Upon returning to the room that night we found a bottle of still water sitting on a tray with the dirtiest glass I had ever seen. At this point we could only laugh it off.

Final thoughts

So, what is going on at the St. Regis Rome? Is this the impact of Covid-19? Is the management prioritizing corporates and big parties over individual guests (during our stay they hosted multiple events for Accenture and a giant birthday party for a Roman socialite on the day of the water fiasco)? They could improve the service with a few simple tweaks, but I don’t think they care. After my third failed attempt to get some water I went down to the front desk to ask if I could speak with the management, and was told that no one was available at the time, but the assistant manager would speak with me the following day. Suffice to say, there was no follow up. At the check-out no one bothered to ask about my experience either. Caveat emptor.