We stayed two nights at the Marriott Marquis Hotel at Times Square recently. It was during the New York Wine Experience, a three day conference held at the hotel.
The hotel is huge. It has slightly under 2,000 rooms. It is located at Times Square, so the views from the rooms are great. The hotel is built around a central open core, with a column of elevators taking you to your floor.
The elevators are interesting. The outside ones have circular glass walls, which is cool. To access an elevator you place your keycard on a panel. It directs you to an elevator, indicated by a letter (A, B, M, etc.). You need to get the location before the elevator arrives and departs! You get used to it!
Check in takes place on the 8th floor. This went smoothly. We hoped for a room upgrade (Using our Bonvoy upgrade certificates) but it didn’t work. (Two years in a row.). However, our room was fine, spacious and had a great view of Times Square.
We had M-Club access. This is also located on the 8th floor. It is fabulous, especially breakfast. In the evening they put out munchies, but not on the scale of the breakfast spread. They have a cash bar. The drinks are quite good.
There is a resort fee, $40 a day as I recall. This worked fine when spent on drinks or food at the hotel.
I went to the gym on the first morning. Although the gym is pretty big, when the hotel has 1,900+ rooms, it is pretty busy. It was a good experience. The gym is on the 23rd floor as I recall. We were on the 41st floor as I recall. The card reader on the 23rd floor wouldn’t read my keycard, sending me back up, so I went down to the 8th floor lobby to get the card checked at the desk. Before doing so, I tried it on the card reader for the elevators on the 8th floor. Now it worked fine and I got back up to our room.
Because of the sheer size, the hotel is a bit impersonal, but it was a good experience overall.