The hotel has a sleepy grandeur—the lobby is still handsome but its best points are somewhat lost to unimaginative lighting, clutter, and a rather sad restaurant seating concept. Still, there are good architectural bones in there.
Most rooms are small, but I got a mini-upgrade to a spacious one with two windows. Sadly, these windows faced a grim, though large, airshaft. I appreciated the space in the room, the Keurig coffee maker (epic win!), and the nice bath products.
The genius behind my room's layout had a very odd notion—let's divide the bathroom space into *two* bathrooms, one reached from the east and one from the west. It seems they thought you might want to get up from one side of the bed and go to the bathroom while your spouse went to his/her bathroom from the other side of the bed. Not solving a problem I've ever had, but hey. Having two toilets and two sinks would be OK, but the sacrifice is . . . no tub, just two tiny showers. Maybe certain traveling groups would find a big benefit here, but it's a net loss for the solo traveler or couple.
Overall, the room was fine and clean, with attentive efforts from housekeeping. The elevators were a bit overtaxed but better than some hotels. Check in went fine but the Park Plaza hasn't latched on to express check out in any form—you can't call or check out via TV but must wait in line for the desk clerk.
I was attending a conference, and here the Park Plaza gets both pluses and minuses. The ballroom space for large dinners and speeches was quite good, with some majestic architecture and details. The mezzainine gathering space was workable if a tad confining for large crowds, and it made up for it with beautiful railings and architectural elements.
But the whole thing breaks down in the tiny, shotgun style conference rooms. Some had no lighting where speakers stood, suitable only for those using slides alone. All had terrible sight lines for any presentation material. Most were too narrow to encourage any discussion from the audience. In fairness, these are rooms repurposed for meetings and were never by any stretch designed for conferences. But they must still be graded on that use, and they fail.
The fourth floor conference rooms have a byzantine layout that one can kinda forgive (but never master). Traffic between sessions becomes semi-crazy through tiny hallways with ambiguous direction and gathering points. And then the crisis: there are not enough bathrooms to accommodate any full-size conference. If you want to schedule an event at which pretty much everyone needs to use the bathroom at a few set times, you do not want to bring the group to the Park Plaza.
The hotel has a nice location within Boston, and it's pleasant to set out on foot to shopping areas, theaters, or the Boston Common.
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