Property: W Atlanta – Midtown
SPG Category: 4
Dates(s): 24 August, 2014 – 19 September, 2014
Nights: 25
Room booked: Wonderful room
Room received: Fantastic suite
Award stay: No
Rating: 1/5

I had the misfortune of staying at the W Atlanta – Midtown hotel for 25 consecutive nights recently, and the extended stay gave me the opportunity to identify an exceeding amount of fuckups and failures within the management of this W. As an SPG Platinum guest, I have stayed at over 50 Starwood hotels and a number of W hotels, and I was surprised to find the quality I would expect at a W had been vapidly sucked out of this establishment. Thankfully, the number of disappointments and problems I experienced during my stay at the W Midtown hotel is not reflective of the usual quality of W hotels, nor is it reflective of the standards usually employed at hotels within the Starwood network.

Hotel Experience Summary

• Room quality is poor, featuring dints, scratches, peeling paint and missing light fixtures
• TV reception sometimes would not work
• Cleanliness is poor, with my bedsheets having appeared to not been changed for 15 consecutive nights
• Cleaning staff forgot to clean the room on one occasion
• Cleaning staff continuously removed glasses and plastic cups from the room without replacing them with anything
• Sleep quality was extremely poor due to inadequate room silencing
• Significant issues with the hotel’s laundry service
• Reservations at the hotel restaurant were not honored
• and more!

Room Quality

Hotel/Room Quality: 1/5

The W Atlanta – Midtown hotel is in need of a serious renovation. On the surface the rooms look generally nice — blooming with bright colors, clean, sharp edges and drenched in purple decals.

But when you look more closely you begin to notice some of the finer details missing. For example, light covers in the bathroom.

Or working lights at all.

After writing a letter of complaint to the hotel manager (who didn’t even bother replying personally, and instead delegated it to another employee), I was upgraded to a Fantantic Suite. The Fantistic Suite is essentially two standard rooms — one room turned into the entrance/lounge area, and the second room acting as the bedroom and surprisingly large bathroom, with walk in shower.  The room quality wasn’t much better even in the suite, generally due to what appeared to be a lack of attention to detail, corner cutting and simply age.

Dints, marks, scratches and holes were rampant in this “suite”.

Wall mounted TV … but exposed cabling. Sigh. Oh, and did I mention the TV reception regularly dropped in and out?

Cleanliness

During my extended stay, there were a few key cleanliness and cleaning staff points identified:

• The cleaning stuff did not appear to have changed the bedsheets at all in the three weeks I stayed in the Wonderful Room.
• There was an occasion where the cleaning staff did not clean the room at all, somehow managing to skip my room.
• I called the concierge (known as Whatever/Whenever at W hotels) a number of times over my stay to request coffee (coffee machines and coffee are included as a part of the room rate). This would sometimes result in an additional coffee machine also being sent to my room. I ended up with four coffee machines being delivered to my room over the course of the stay (this indicates there is no inventory management process around sending more than one coffee machine to a single room, or even analysis on whether a room has a coffee machine or not).
• There were three instances where the cleaning staff removed all the cups and glasses from the room and not replace them. Twice I had to leave notes to staff requesting them to leave some cups or glasses.

Sleep Quality

All the rooms at the W Atlanta – Midtown hotel appear to have extremely bad silencing. Having been allocated a room on the 5th floor (514), I was attacked by noise from three different sources:

1. Noises from guests in the hallway, particularly those passing through from the elevators to the pool area at the other end of the hall
2. Noise from the street, as the 5th floor is the lowest floor that guest rooms are located on, particularly on a Friday and Saturday night
3. Construction noise from the room that was being modified or renovated opposite room 506 down the hall.

As an anecdote, a friend who was staying down the hall from me told me that he sneezed while he was in his bathroom, and an individual who was walking past outside in the hallway said “bless you”. The fact that you can hear, from the hallway, someone sneezing in their room in their bathroom, and that you can hear someone say “bless you” from the hallway in return, speaks quantities about the quality of the noise cancelling and silencing employed in the guest rooms.

Hotel Laundry Issues

As I was staying here for a month on business, there were a number of times where I decided to utilise the hotel’s laundry services. Of course, just like everything else in this hotel, it was a huge disappointment. Apart from the W’s broken promises that the laundry will be returned by 6 p.m. on the same day as long as you hand it in by 9 a.m. (which, four out of five times didn’t occur), there was another major incident…

At 11 p.m. on a Saturday night during my stay, I was interrupted by two employees knocking at the door. Upon answering, the two men explained that there had been some kind of mixup with the laundry service, and they believed that someone else’s garments had been returned to my room by mistake. They asked if they could come into my room and take a look around for the garments that may belong to another guest. I told them that no laundry had been delivered to my room (even mine, which I had sent away on the Friday morning) and respectfully declined their request to enter my room. They then left, but returned a few minutes later with a bag containing various women’s panties. They asked me to take a look to see whether any of the garments were mine. As I was the only person staying in the room they were clearly not mine, and so they left and returned again a few minutes later with some of my shirts that I had sent off to the laundry the previous day.

The following day, I was contacted by a woman staying in room 908 (I was in room 514 at this point), who told my she noticed some laundry was delivered to her room while she was out, and she believed they were mine. I went up to her room, and alas, some of my socks and undergarments had been delivered to her room. Ironically, the bag that was delivered to her room had my name on it (see photo attached), so I have no idea how these items ended up being delivered to her.

I am not aware about whether the panties the W employees showed me the previous night were hers, or whether they belonged to yet another guests who had been caught up in this saga, but I found the entire thing pretty strange and completely unprofessional. Messing up the rooms and ownership of laundry garments, particularly more sensitive items like underwear and panties, is generally a symptom of a poor management procedure, but I can understand mistakes happen. However, having two men knocking on my door at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night requesting to enter my room to look for someone else’s clothing because of bad hotel management is totally unacceptable. Similarly, if I were the woman who owned the panties, and if I knew that there were two W men going around the hotel with a bag full of my panties late on a Saturday night showing random people in hotel rooms, I would be pretty horrified and disgusted at the incompetence of the hotel.

Restaurant Issues

The main restaurant within the W Atlanta – Midtown hotel is TRACE, a restaurant which focuses on “traceable” ingredients and “conscious cuisine.” From my experience of the food, having eaten there four or five times for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I would say that they deliver on high-quality, tasty food. I also enjoyed how their menus were updated every few days, and hand-signed by the chef, Shean Suter. However, my experience with TRACE wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine.

Quite simply: they don’t honor reservations.

When I was in my room at around 7 p.m., I called up to check whether there was any availability for a table of six in 20 minutes’ time. I was assured by the gentleman on the phone, “Julian”, that there was availability and took down my details for the booking.

When I arrived at the TRACE restaurant, Julian regrettably told me there was a number of ‘walk-ins’ just now, and thus the kitchen was swamped with orders. Because of this, he told me that my five guests and I would have to wait for 10 minutes before a table would be available. I asked him what he thought the definition of a ‘reservation’ was, and why this deviated from the common understanding of what a reservation is, and he excused his behavior by saying his manager had called him over which caused him to forget about completing my booking. Right.

Hotel Elevator Issues

To make matters worse, when returning from the TRACE restaurant after a failed reservation, I was greeted by a huge congregation of people in the lobby. As it turned out, two of the five elevators in the hotel were out of service. There was a queue for elevators that extended past the elevators area overflowing into the lobby.

Conclusion

As you can probably anticipate, I had a terrible time at the W Atlanta – Midtown hotel and I would not wish a similar experience on anyone. I recommend you avoid it at all costs as I’m sure the number of disappointments and failings I experienced during my stay are not merely isolated to just one individual. Lights not working, missing light fixtures, bed not being changed a single time in 15+ nights, empty promises of dinner reservations, and employees showing me other guests’ panties are all things I have certainly not come to expect when staying at Starwood Category 4 hotels and hotels within the Starwood/W group. Sadly, due to my experience here, I cancelled my W booking in Indonesia for a few weeks’ time, and I will certainly do not think I will consider any W hotels in future bookings for my travel plans going forward this year.