I don’t feel that this deserves the 4*s that it has – although it is more than suitable to rest your head after a tiring day at the parks, for those that have more high standards (like me), it might not meet your expectations. The cleanliness of this hotel is questionable. It’s not dirty by no means, but I found the public areas (i.e. hotel room corridors, lift areas etc to look a little shabby (i.e. carpets looked worse for wear and needed a good hoover).
Apart from using guest services once and the car rental service, we didn’t use any of the hotels amenities so I couldn’t comment on this, however we did take a peek at the pool and for a hotel of this size, it was pretty small, and was right next to the car park (although walled off) so it didn’t quite have that relaxing pool vibe that other florida hotels offer. I will add though that the service we received from car rentals and guest services were perfect. This hotel was part of a package that we booked through Royal Caribbean as part of our honeymoon (we were going on a cruise straight after our time in Florida). Our booking stated that we were celebrating our honeymoon, and we even arrived with t.shirts that stated we’d just got married, however the receptionist didn’t upgrade us, neither was anything nice left in our room upon check-in, which was a little sad as well.
The car park can get really full and one night we arrived back late (around midnight) and if it wasn’t for a car pulling out of a space, we would have to have parked somewhere else, which I completely disagree with seeing as though we ‘belonged’ to that hotel. They really should have enough spaces.
Also (and this really put me off!), during our stay, I just happened to be walking back to our room down the corridor, and heard a dog bark from within one of the hotel rooms. I did not know this was a pet friendly hotel (Which explains the hairs on the carpet outside of the lifts!).
The fire alarm went off in the middle of the night during our stay and I felt that the communication from staff was poor. We left the building, and were wandering around the car park at 4am – no one told us it was ok to go back in – we just used our initiative. We almost got back to our room (on the 8th floor) and the alarm went off again. It seems they have got an automated voice over the tannoy because this was a false alarm, but no one let us know, and we were left in limbo wandering whether to vacate the building again or not.
The rooms themselves are large, however I wouldn’t class the beds as double beds – they are more ¾ beds, so 2 (medium build!) adults sharing would be ok, but not a lot of room left at all.
The bathroom was small and sometimes not enough towels were left (why do cleaners always leave crap loads of flannels or small floor towels but only 1 bath sheet, even when there’s 2 adults sharing?! So frustrating!). I don’t think the bed sheets were changed every day, maybe not every other day either – I will say though, if you pop the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on your door, and the cleaners go past, I did find that they do not return back to your room later (I’ve always found that cleaners do usually do this), so twice during our week there, we came back to an un-made room which was a little deflating after a long day in the parks. I found that their cleaning wasn’t as thorough as it could have been as well!
The location is ok – it is in walking distance of Universal Studios (about a 15-20 minute walk), and is next door to TGI Fridays. Not too far away is Wendy’s and Ihop but still a good 10-15 min walk. Apart from that, there aren’t really any shops/pubs etc in walking distance.
All in all, the stay was ok but I wouldn’t revisit.
