Honestly, there's nothing really wrong as such with the hotel, except that what once passed as glamour is rapidly starting to look very tired as the years go by. Some people will love the chintz, the gold fittings, white-gloved attendants and the liberal use of barely readable fancy script on each and every sig - but it really wasn't for me.
As others have noted, the reception and lobby are often overwhelmingly busy. On my check-in in the late afternoon there were twelve desks and probably only four being manned, with a resulting queue sprawling across the lobby itself. Fortunately there were staff on hand to direct and keep things moving, but simply adding more staff on the desks would have helped better.
The rooms have been updated with a little bit of technology to drag them into the 21st century - an alarm clock with an iPod dock, a decent size flat screen and an individual room based WiFi router. However, my experience of the internet connection was that it was exceptionally poor, especially for the $15.95 USD daily fee. Other oddities were a lack of a safe and an rather fancy, yet entirely empty, mini-bar.
Finally, I only ate here once for breakfast, in what seemed to be pitched as the more low-key buffet restaurant "Oscar's" that's tucked away downstairs. I think everyone knows that your average hotel breakfast price is way overpriced, but seriously for 40 dollars (no, really) I'd expect something more than the tired looking array of hot and cold food on offer here, with coffee and juice served up by aging robot-like staff who seem to have lost the will to smile many years previously.
hotel reviews