It takes a lot to get me excited enough to review something. Sometimes I love a product so much I can’t help but spread the wealth (like the online backup solution I’ll be covering next week) and sometimes I feel a sense of obligation to warn people away from something.
This past week I had the pleasure of spending several days in Washington DC. I spent time with family, had dinner with some Congressmen, went on a great tour of the Pentagon (including the basement!), and spent a night in beautiful Chantilly, Virginia. The trip was, for the most part, outstanding. My four-night stay at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City, however, was not. Travelers, beware!
The first thing you’ll notice is the smell of cigarette smoke when you walk in the front door. It took me several days to figure out it was coming from the bar in the lobby: with smoking ordinances popping up all over the country I guess I forgot that you can still do it indoors in some places. Still, as far away as it was, I could smell it.
I soon found that the rooms, while beautiful, are sub-par in several ways. The ceiling was paper-thin and I could hear everything going on above me. Each time the toilet flushed upstairs, it sounded as if it was happening in my room. The shower – get this – had half a door. It extends halfway from one wall (faucet-side) to the middle and does not move: it is literally half a door, and water gets everywhere. Why, Hyatt, why?
On the second day of my stay I attended a banquet in the hotel and drank several glasses of tea. They did a great job with the food and drinks, except for the dried lipstick I eventually found on the top of my glass. Though I had not been directly told it was clean, it was handed to me by a hotel waiter so I assumed this would be the case. My bad.
In addition to dirty glasses, the Hyatt Regency Crystal City also charges extra (by a lot) for virtually everything: local phone calls, Internet access, using the business center, and even late check-out. Seriously, when is the last time you saw a hotel actually charge for late check-out ($50 at that)? The business center at the Ritz Carlton was half as expensive, and those of many hotels in the Crystal City area are free. I travel often and the number of different charges for things was a first for me, but then again, so was the shower half-door.
The overnight food options were abysmal. I found myself needing a snack at 3am one morning and found only four options to choose from, the least expensive of which was a ham sandwich that would have cost me $17. The Hyatt does not have any other food options available in the hotel: no five-dollar peanuts in the rooms, no snack machines, not even a damn bowl of apples on the front desk. Furthermore, three of the four overnight options are entirely meat-based, rendering it nearly impossible for vegetarians to get a late-night bite (unless they happen to be craving a “seasonal fruit tray”). Hyatt also completely failed to accommodate for the hundreds of guests who were staying for a big 4-day Humane Society conference. Good job alienating your major clients, Hyatt.
I spent the latter half of my stay trying to contact a manager to let them know about these issues: this was very difficult. While some businesses make a point of letting you know who their managers are and how to contact them to provide feedback, the Hyatt makes it damn near impossible. It took the woman at the front desk five minutes to get me an email address, which it turned out belongs to a girl who previously interned there and now works at a nearby steakhouse. Useless.
I did leave a letter at the desk addressed to “The Manager” and received a call as I was departing on Monday from Richard Leung, Executive Chef. I’m not sure what part of the issues I communicated to them (primarily the lipstick on my glass and lack of overnight dining options) necessitated a call from their chef, but I guess the gesture was nice. He apologized profusely, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was probably my worst hotel experience ever.
I checked out that afternoon and went to stay at the Comfort Suites in Chantilly, Virginia. They had free in-room internet, a free business center, free breakfast, and in-room menus for and directions to surrounding restaurants (including delivery availability). Much better.
The Hyatt Regency Crystal City needs some major work in the customer satisfaction department before I would consider staying there again. If you are visiting Washington DC anytime soon and looking for a hotel near Reagan National Airport, find yourself another place to stay.
primarily due to its keyboard size, which is (to my knowledge) the biggest available for a netbook. It also packs a gigabyte of DDR2 RAM and a 160 GB hard drive, which is more than my two-year old HP Pavillion that cost twice as much. Its battery can last up to 8 hours during modest use or, according to the editors at CNET, 5 hours and 14 minutes during video playback. Oh, and it weighs in at just under three pounds.
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