We spent the night before and the night of our wedding at the Hotel del Coronado, and I don’t think we’d stay there again even if they paid us. I used to live in San Diego, and I would love to check out the Crystal Pier cottages, I think it’d be a great place to stay. I mean, you can’t really feel 100% secure taking a stroll along the beach late at night (a friend was robbed) like you can in Coronado, but there are a ton of restaurants and things to do in PB. Coronado’s quieter, but…well, here’s why we wouldn’t stay at the Del again.
I booked over Hotwire, for a rate of $189/night, pretty good rate for the hotel I’ve been told, but no chump change. We called them, let them know we had a lot of things going on and would have to check in a little late (why we couldn’t just check in by phone like a lot of hotels let you do, I dunno) and when we left our rehearsal party (beach bonfire at Coronado’s North Beach) and got to the Del, we waited twenty minutes in line (being third) to find out our room had been given away. It was 6pm, two hours after their check-in time, about six hours after I’d called and the woman I talked to said she’d put a note not to give our room away. Anyway, we waited twenty more minutes to be “upgraded” to a different room, with two full beds instead of one king, in the “California something” wing. The new section, right by the pool. So we check out our room so we’ll know where it is when we come back late at night, and 'cause we hafta pee, and it takes us ten minutes to find the room because there are no maps and the desk’s instructions were a little too vague to help us in the rabbit warren. So we get into our room, and my beloved goes into the loo to pee. “Huh, he says, there’s a washrag on the floor.” “Yeah?” I said, “The beds are kind of messed up too.” I go into the bathroom to pee and take in the pubic hair on the toilet seat (not my beloved’s, this girl can tell) the soap stuck to the sink basin, the dirty towels, and a lot of other little signs that the room has not been cleaned. I tried to call housekeeping, no answer. I call the concierge and am put on hold for five minutes before I hang up. We walk all the way back through the rabbit warren to tell the desk that the room is unacceptable and wait ten minutes to do so. We assure her that we just want a clean room, not a new room. The manager comes out to say, oops, we’ll comp you a breakfast. Great, we say, whatever, we really have to go. Then we leave, to get no end of grief from my beloved’s mother for being gone from our party so long.
We ordered the basic breakfast of coffee, juice, and four pastries with three adorable teeny jars of jam. We liked it so much we ordered it for the morning after our wedding, too. When we woke up that morning there was a room service bill with a dinner we didn’t order on it, and the first breakfast charge on it as well with no indication of it being a comped breakfast. Oh well, we’d resolve it later. I open a jam, and find it half full, someone else’s knife marks in it. At this point, it was like, “Why does anybody EVER stay here?” Filthy room, used jam delivered with the $35 breakfast, $15/ day to SELF PARK your car, and erroneous bills presented…
SO we waited in another huge line to check out and ask them what was going on.
So that’s our Hotel del horror story. Sorry for the semi-hijack.
Oh, and when I was doing the once over room inspection to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind, we found a few more things that weren’t ours or the hotel’s, yuck, yuck, yuck! Never again.
