I spent one night on business travel at the Fitzpatrick in midtown. I chose it mainly due to its location (proximity to conference/meetings I was in NYC for), reasonable rate, and generally positive reviews on Tripadvisor.
Upon arrival, I found the main lobby to be pretty modest. No big deal. I've stayed at some much more expensive hotels in NYC on business, which had grand lobbies. This is not one of those places. Think Howard Johnson's. Fortunately, the front desk staff was pretty helpful checking me in .
I arrived mid evening, and it was 34 deg F outside, so when I entered my room it was pretty cold. I turned the heat on but it wasn't working (a 1980's vintage under-window unit with analog buttons and a big dial, not the wall-mounted thermostats that you find 99% of the time these days.) Fiddled with the heater further for a few minutes, and no luck. No air blowing, no heat. Call the front desk, and a man came up 10 minutes later, basically took the entire front chassis off the heater, banged it and twisted some knobs, and got it working.) 30 minutes later, it stopped again and wouldn't start. Called the front desk again, the attendant said "let me see what I can do" and that was it. Never saw or heard from anyone after that. It was 12:30am and I needed to sleep, so I just sucked it up and slept in a cold room.
The room itself was fair. A bit dated, and small, but again it was decent. Were it not for the heating problem, I wouldn't have really had an issue.
Hotel staff was very apologetic the next morning. To my disappointment however, they didn't offer me any sort of (partial) refund on the stay. Even a token amount, or a free breakfast or something, I probably would have been OK. But the thing that really frosted me was the lack of response the night before, and failure in the morning for them to actually do anything other than pay me lip service.
I subsequently wrote an email to the hotel GM, and received a call the next day apologizing further. They offered me a free upgrade on my next stay there (if I ever chose to return.) That's slightly better than lip service, but unfortunately too little too late.
One other thing that I found annoying was that there was no in-room Internet service. There was supposed to be, but I didn't pick up any WiFi signal with the SSID listed in their guide.
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