This hotel is extremely dirty, outdated, and was very smelly. There was no one at the front desk to check me in, the elevator was broken (I was assigned a room on the 3rd floor) and there is no parking on site, you have to park in meters and/or in a parking lot 2 blocks away. My room had dirty wood floors, soiled bed linens, and someone else's food in the refrigerator. I did not sleep there because of the bugs that were nesting behind the head board of the bed.

Evidently this hotel was great in its time but nothing has been done to update/clean it and the pictures that you see on the web site are absolutely not updated.

The outside marquee sign was not even lit up when I got there so I did not know it was open and thought that I was booked into a closed down hotel.

Hotels.com has stated that they are taking this hotel off of their offering list so if you get this info from somewhere else, be sure to use caution when booking this hotel.

Do not believe any of the websites that advertise this hotel. It may have been OK 50 years ago, but it has not been cleaned or taken care of since. We never complain about hotels as our needs are pretty basic, however, this hotel was absolutely the worst hotel we've ever seen.

1) The hotel and rooms are very dirty - the floor, the bathrooms, the bed, everything. We had to go and buy large beach towels to sleep on, since the sheets and pillows (which were of different sizes) had to be covered by something in order to sleep on. The rooms were never cleaned in three days we were there. There was a constant smell of dirt and mildew.

2) The window was so dirty, you could not see out of it. It was cracked and would not close completely. This was especially a problem, since about 10 feet from the hotel, another hotel was being built and even at 7am on Sat morning, we felt like we were right in the middle of all the hammering and drilling. When asked to switch the room, we were told that all rooms are taken and were told that other rooms are in even worse shape!

3) No soap or shampoo in the rooms. When asked for a bar soap, all we were given was shower gel. We were TOLD to use it as shampoo and as a soap (since they had nothing else to offer). So we went to the nearest Walgreen and bought shampoo and soap.

Please, please, please do not book this hotel if you value even the lowest standards of cleanliness or safety.

I arrived to find a hotel that was nothing like the pictures or description on Orbitz.com. I really am shocked at the discrepancy between reality and marketing.

There was no check-in desk, just 2 sleazy men sitting at a glass table on their laptops. Instead of trying to help, the two of them were bickering about some type of business deal gone wrong. One was telling the other "Man, you got to get paid!..."
Then they finally acknowledged me, gave me elevator eyes and gave me the impression that I was prey. I am a young, single female and was traveling alone. These are NOT the type of guys I would be alone in a room with. They were sleazy.

They gave me my room key, and when I opened the door, I was really shocked. It was DISGUSTING. Every fabric and upholstery surface was soiled and stained. I did not want to sit or touch anything.

It really is something out of a bad movie. I called orbitz customer service immediately. They called the manager who just so happened to be the creepiest of the 2 men). He was such a jerk to me, but finally did show me two other rooms. They were all bad, but I needed a place to stay, so I chose the "Honeymoon Suite."

It had a round bed with a mirror on the ceiling. It is reasonable to assume it has been their since the 70s. The whole time I just kept thinking that there were cameras behind that mirror.

The long hours of thumping of music next door prompted me to go out and buy earplugs. The music did stop about 11 pm.

Luckily, I was able to catch the next flight home in the morning.

TRAVELERS BEWARE! I would like to start by saying as the poster child for what could possible go wrong on a vacation will, my stay at this hotel was nothing short of travesty, even for me. The Marlin Hotel's website and Expedia's advertisement for this hotel is nothing like the reality that is this hotel. Maybe the photos of the hotel's exterior were accurate in the 1930s when this hotel first opened, and maybe therenovations reported on the hotel's website were started then abandoned in the 1990s. The hotel's exterior only gets grimer and grimier as the natural light improves. And no artficial light can cover the loosened letters in the sign, the rust stains from the gutters and the missing light fixtures, missing molding, and pitted exterior stuccou. You know if a hotel requires you prepay minimum 5 night stay that there is really going to be a problem. Or if you have to ask the front desk personnel,"Is this the Marlin Hotel?", you may have booked a lemon. Oh yeah, what front desk? There is only a glass dining room table that workers sit and surf the net on their personal computers. By the way if you have never had a fraudelent call, if you give your credit card number to someone at the front desk, someone by the name of Habib Singh will call requesting your personal financial info to retrieve allegedly taken out of your account last year. I did not give out that info, and I no I have no proof of the actual person was one of the 2 hotel staff, but it is just strange that it happened very close to the time I checked in to this hotel, and they only knew I had a Wachovia account and they called me on my new cell number, no purchases or transactions I have used with my Wachovia account have I used this cell number except to allow this hotel to place a hold on my card and I gave them my cell number to alert me when my room was ready. Also no other guest was asked for a deposit on the minibar(2 Snickers, and old Rice Crispy, some beer and water in the fridge) at the tune of $50 per day.

General upkeep is not a priority of the management. No one seems to care to rinse off the seagull droppings on the sidewalk and outdoor steps. Nor do they care to pick up the cigarette butts and food wrappers left behind by the hotel staff(I don't think anyone else was checked into this hotel the first 48 hours of my cousin and my stay) The outside and inside public furniture was soiled and damaged, and outdated. The window in the women's ublic bathroom downstairs was broken and the cracks were stuffed with toilet paper. Several light fixtures in the hallways were unlit, and the carpeting was so stained and soiled I could not tell the its true original color. I made the mistake of attempting to take the stairs to my room, and the door was blocked by garbage bags and the stairs were soiled and littered with trash and yet more cigarette butts. The nightmare that was our room, billed as a two bedroom suite, was in actuality a peeling stucco, cracked molding, ugly steel furniture, broken furniture handle dump. Most of the windows lacked privacy blinds so my cousin and I flashed our neighbors nightly. And maid service did not routinely come until after 5p. And when she did show she sprayed Frebreeze flushed the toilet, and pulled up the covers to unchanged sheets. You could get clean towels if you reminded her

I was disappointed to find out that Expedia does not guarantee the authenticity of any hotel on its website, but if you call customer service they will create a case file. And if pushed they will call the hotel and ask management if they will refund your money. But you are not guaranteed reimbursement and are still responsible to find further lodgings with added expense. Why don't they research these hotels so the most accurate and up to date info is on their website, and dump those that are not up to basic standard?

I made the mistake of not researching on my own via tripadvisor.com or other sites like hotel.com...live and learn. But I loved South Beach and the Ritz's Spa, and Lincoln Road! And I will be filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau about this hotel.