I excitedly booked this hotel when I saw that they were having a special anniversary promotion rate. I had been wanting to try this property out since my parents stayed here a few years ago and had good things to say about it.
The staff upon entering seemed tired and not at all interested in welcoming the guests. Opening the door almost seemed mechanical for them. Upon reaching reception I gave my reservation details to VARENNA who, without even a smile asked for our passports and started processing our details. After a minute of typing she looks up and says that since we requested a high floor room it was still not ready and the cleaning was just about to begin. This was at 12NN. She says however in a very bored and monotonous tone that we have promotion right now if you would like to upgrade to a club room (add HK$600+) or a suite (add HK$1000+) then these rooms are ready. I ask for details and she continues talking about breakfast, bigger room, etc in a speedy manner that I couldn't quite understand everything she was telling me. I then ask her, would you happen to have any other room in our category even on lower floors available now? And she says no. (Which made me think, didn't she just tell me that my room wasn't available BECAUSE I had requested for a high floor?) And so I say, okay we will just wait for our room to be ready then. And she says, well the breakfast itself is HK$500+ so with a room upgrade it would be worth it! And I say with a smile, no thank you, we don't eat breakfast. And so she says okay just come back 2-3PM maybe. And she presumed we would be out of her face. So I go, uhm, where may we leave our luggage? And she points to the other side, over there. At this point I gave up hope on a good stay.
We go to the concierge to leave our luggage and the guy goes, what name? And he punches it in the computer. He goes, you leave luggage? Your room is ready. SO UHM WHAT WAS THAT? So he leaves us to go back to Varenna ourselves (we are walking back and forth the lobby like lost lamb). I go to Varenna, he says our room is ready? And she types in and says quickly no, no it is not. She gives the guy a call and whispers on the line. The guy comes and says oh, your room not yet ready. Still cleaning sorry. He takes our luggage and says come back after an hour it is done. So which is it? 1 hour or 2-3 hours as Varenna told us? I didn't make an issue of it there anymore as it seemed hopeless and I felt like we were being tricked into upgrading at this point. We left for lunch, came back before 3PM and our room was ready.
The hotel is starting to show signs of wear. When we get into our room on the 12th floor it smelled strongly of rubber which smells like that of at the back of a carpet. Did not want to complain anymore, thank goodness we were there only for 2 nights!
On our second night when we got back at around 10PM, 2 rooms on our hallway side had their doors open. Each room had a few men who were watching TV and were smoking! One room was right across us and so our room smelled like smoke the whole night. Again, I didn't complain anymore and just wondered how security or other hotel staff did not even find out about this when immediately as you step off the elevator you could smell strong cigarette smoke.
I was happy to check out the hotel the next day! We went out the hotel with our luggage in tow and not even one staff member bothered to ask if we needed a taxi to the airport or wherever. ADIOS MIRA!
