Came her for one night with family, before a cruise. We arrived at 9pm exhausted after a long flight from the UK, to find a long queue at check-in and one person on the desk. This was despite the fact that we were told that the hotel was full due to a conference, and I noticed that there was only one person again at the desks the next morning at 9am. Eventually we were served by Angel, who, having observed that one of our party was in a wheelchair, proceeded to place us in different towers and on different floors of the hotel. He did not alert us to this, merely saying that we would be on the floor above, which was untrue. It was the bellboy, Alejandro, who spotted the difficulty. He pointed out that it would take a long time and inconvenience to get to each other's rooms, particularly as the wheelchair user needed one of us to push the chair at all times. At this point, Alejandro went to the manager, Wendy, hidden away in a back room and not assisting the long line, who managed to find us rooms on the same floor. She agreed to comp us breakfast when we asked. She did not offer, so limited service recovery there. The rooms themselves were shabby, poky and freezing, due to an unusual cold snap in Miami. The temperature in the rooms did not seem to work at all, so we switched it off and slept in a lot of our clothes. It did not seem to occur to management to turn up the heat in the hotel due to the outside cold weather. Inside the hotel the aircon was on full blast. The layout of the room was laughable. If the bathroom door was not fully closed, you were effectively trapped in the shower because of the way the door opened out. Our room was right next to the lifts, and once my husband opened the room door, we realised that anyone standing at the lifts could see right into our room and me getting dressed! It was also really noisy. There's no soundproofing, so you can hear the elevator pinging all the time, as well as people getting in and out. Also beware, the doors do not close by themselves. You need to ensure you pull them shut properly before you leave, so there's a real risk of theft.
Breakfast was incredibly slow and extremely expensive, despite the lack of diners. The outside area was replete with plastic plants and plastic furniture, which was falling apart. This is Miami. There is no excuse for not having lush, natural foliage. The servers were lovely and the food was good. There was lots of fresh fruit. Unfortunately there were many pigeons which wandered around between and sat on the tables. It was very unhygienic. The staff did make a few half-hearted attempts to shoo them away.
We didn't sit by the pool because it was so cold. We did go for a walk on the beach but couldn't get into the hotel with our key as the back entrance wasn't working.
To add insult to injury, when we checked out, they had aded another 600 USD by mistake to the bill. We had paid for the rooms in advance.
All in all, this is tired and overpriced, trading on its name. This is not a 5* hotel. Avoid.
