My husband and took our one vacation of the year to San Francisco and did a lot of research on where to stay. We picked the Baldwin Hotel for its location, good price and positive reviews. The hotel was perfect for us - great location, good sized room with a big closet, surprisingly quiet. It has less of a hotel feeling and more of feeling like a house (the doors have actual keys rather than cards!) and I really don't have any complaints at all about the hotel itself. But, we did have a disappointing experience with customer service that tainted our stay. We were in Vancouver before heading to SF, and the night before our flight my husband got a terrible case of food poisoning from our dinner. He was so sick there was no way we could travel the next day and we had to change our flight to the following day. So, instead of spending the 4 nights we at the Baldwin we had planned, we missed the first night and were there for 3 nights. I called them right away to let them know we would be a day late. It is their policy to charge you for the night unless you have a doctor's note as proof of illness -- which we of course didn't, since we were in Canada and my husband didn't need a doctor, he just needed to get through it and rest for a day. We explained the situation to them multiple times and they just wouldn't budge. Now of course I understand this is their policy, but it's always disappointing when a place of business won't be flexible in extreme circumstances -- it wasn't like we never showed up for our reservation, we got there as soon as we could and still stayed for 3 nights. And the night that we missed was a Monday night -- surely not a busy night where they would have lost money by not renting the room to someone else. It was just frustrating - it was hard to lose a day of our vacation and lose the extra money from having to pay for double hotel rooms that night on top of it. I find that most places of business in that kind of situation will be more understanding. After talking to several people, they finally offered us a complimentary night's stay through the end of this year, but wouldn't let us apply it to the night we missed - and we obviously aren't going back to SF this year, so it wasn't really worth anything. Oh well - it really is a good hotel for price and location and I liked the room - just not so much for above and beyond customer service. They were very penny pinching about the whole thing.
hotel reviews