We stayed at the W San Diego for 2 nights over the Memorial Day weekend. This place is fun. They cleared out the lobby on Saturday night and brought in a DJ. My husband and I watched from the balcony. The Beach bar was also fun. The only problem was they served drinks in plastic cups a la spring break. It draws an extremely young crowd so I guess this doesn't bother them.
The beds are fabulously comfortable. I do wish they had coffee makers in the rooms. I ordered a Belgian waffle from room service for breakfast and it arrived cold so that was a bummer. The hotel is really in a great location downtown within walking distance of Gaslamp and Little Italy. The walks are a bit spooky since it it very dark and there are an alarming number of homeless people sleeping on the streets. But there were lots of people out walking so we felt pretty safe.

We stayed at the W Hotel for 3 nights. We were in San diego for a mix of business and vacation. We were looking forward to a 'W' stay, & were not disappointed. Overall, we loved this hotel! It is beautiful, with a great design aesthetic. The rooms are great, even if on the small side. Loved the bed (so comfy!), the flat-screen TV, the window seats, windows that open, the bathroom design & Bliss products. Just about everything about the room was great.

The lobby is beautiful and is like an oasis when you enter. The outside beach bar was great for hanging out. Groovy lounge music is played throughout the hotel - nice touch. The gym is great, because it is essentially outside - had a lovely workout. The pool area was nice, but very small. They could use more staff visits to the pool to clean up towels etc. The clientele is not one to pick up after themselves, so the seating often appeared taken after the guests had left. Overall, the hotel is quite spotless and smells great.

We found the staff pleasant and helpful overall. We realize no hotel stay is perfect. We did have a couple of annoyances, which echo complaints of previous reviews, but these are pretty minor details. One front desk guy appeared to be trying to humor us, but was really quite unprofessional. He had a heck of a time trying to expedite a room change, despite his assurance that changing to King room would be no problem. He seemed to think that we would enjoy chatting with him repeatedly to get this done. In the end, after several hours, he was totally ineffective & we called the 'whatever, whenever' desk who switched us immediately. The other annoyance was waking up to loud partyers next door at 1AM. This happened on our last night only. We called the front desk & they sent security up within a few minutes. It took awhile for them to settle. This, of course, can & does happen at all hotels & requires a bit of luck. The last annoyance comes from street noise, which is no worse than any other downtown hotel in San Diego. Would recommend the higher the floor, the better re: noise.

One other note: Enterprise rental cars will drop off and pick up their cars at no extra charge from this hotel - very convenient.

Overall, we would highly recommend this hotel & we would definitely be happy to stay here again.

Unlike some prior reviews, I had an excellent few days at the W San Diego. The hotel is more for young singles/ yuppies (20s-30s), as the hotel lounge and bars are a big hang out with the yonger crowd, epecially during the weekends. The room was smaller than I expected, but the beds were excellent and the room/bathroom was otherwise great. The hotel overall is a very cool modern design. The beach bar was pretty cool as a roof top bar. Breakfast was pretty good, but service was slow. The pool was nice, but very small. Overall, no big complaints. I had a pleasant stay.

What was supposed to be a nice relaxing getaway to San Diego for the night turned into a disaster and every single thing that went wrong was due to the W. This was by far one of the worst hotel experiences I have ever had. As a frequent traveler, I take hotel stays very seriously and I have high expectations, especially for 4 and 5 star hotels which charge over $300/night. We should have known what we were in for when we arrived at the valet and there was nobody there. Finally after driving in circles around the property we spotted someone and flagged him down. Once inside the hotel, we thought it was decent, your typical hipster hotel ala the Standard or Viceroy hotels in LA. Since I have stayed at the W before in other cities I assumed we would have a pleasant stay. Wow was I wrong. We were told the rooms were not ready and we should sit in the "living room" and have a drink (it was after 3 oclock - check in time). We complied and waited for almost an hour. I finally had to go say something to the girl at the desk. She could care less as she just said "well sorry" and giggled. I was appalled. They didn't even TRY to offer us a cocktail or something to appease us. Finally a very rude man came up and handed us a key without an apology for the wait. Not even a word spoken other than "here." He didn't even have the decency to show us to the elevator. When we got in our room it reeked of smoke and the bedding was severly stained. We had a lovely view of a bum haven and noticed that the valet parks the cars in an uncovered, unsecured lot across the street.....for $26! The cocktail waitress told us that the in-house restaurant Rice and the rooftop bar Beach were the hot spots in the city and we should make plans to spend the evening in the hotel, so we did. We made reservations for 8:15 at Rice and set out for a walk around town (the only time during this trip without complaints....we were far away from the W). We came back to the hotel in hopes of getting ready for the evening. The shower was freezing cold. No hot water. We got ready and went to Rice. We were promptly seated though we had already order drinks in the lounge. We informed the hostess that we had ordered drinks so that she could alert the cocktail waitress. She never did and it took the poor waitress 20 minutes to locate us. We waited about 40 minutes from the time we were seated and never were approached by a waiter. I finally had to flag one down to REQUEST service. He was very apologetic and passed the blame onto the hostess. The food was so-so. Certainly nothing to rave about and most definitely nothing worth waiting 45 minutes for a waiter to serve us. After dinner we went up to the Beach bar. It was definitely NOT a hot scene. More remniscent of a high school kegger. We decided to call it a night. The next morning our bill was slipped under the door. Somehow on the bill was both our dinner charge and another charge for $133 from Rice. We had to call and haggle it out with the concierge. What a wake up call! We decided at that point to call our trip short and get out of there as soon as possible. Of course the valet took forever to retrieve our car...and we drove away from the W as fast as possible. I can say wholeheartedly that I will never stay at this hotel again and would never recommend it to friends. You'd probably have better luck at the Motel 6. I am so disappointed, I'd probably boycott the entire chain of W hotels.