Now that I've rediscovered my blog, I thought I would share my experience staying at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Denver for our 36th Anniversary. I originally created this for Hotels.com, thinking I could post this as my comment on the stay. Apparently Hotels.com wasn't able to accept the comment. Here's the post:
We stayed two nights to celebrate our 36th wedding anniversary in a "Mountain View 1 King Bed" room. Our bed at home is king size and I doubt the bed in our room was really king size, but instead perhaps queen size or maybe something in between. Never the less the sheets were not big enough and each morning we awoke to the bottom sheets pulled out.
Parking is in a public parking lot under the building. While you are supposed to be able to use your room key to get into the lot, we spent 5 minutes sliding our key up and down with cars piling up behind us. Finally just took a ticket at $6 for the first hour and went back to the front desk. They quickly fixed the problem and changed my charge for parking from $21/day to $10/day. I wasn't even aware parking cost anything if we were guests at the hotel let alone $21 a day. Yikes - we could have taken the light rail to the hotel. The "parking fee" adds to the price of your stay at the hotel.
Internet choices are to either establish a T-Mobile Hotspot service plan account for wireless, or pay $9.95 per 24 hour period for wired. My laptop was prepared for either so I chose the wired rather than establish a service plan I might never use again. Since check-in is at 3:00PM and Check-out is at 11:00AM which is only 20 hours rather than 24 they are charging for at least four hours you can not use. In our case, we didn't get settled in our room and get the Internet set up until 6PM, thus I could only use 17 hours for the last day's service. When are hotels going to learn that people are migrating to hotels that don't charge for internet access?
Other premier hotels offer a free breakfast or at least free coffee. This hotel has an awesome buffet breakfast, but it costs $15 per person plus tax and tips. This added an additonal $60 for our stay which I consider another fee for staying at the hotel. The server and other restaurant personnel were very friendly and service was great.
Speaking of costs, there were two Aquafina bottles of water in the room. They had tags around the necks saying they were $6 each. Room temperature tap water at $6 a bottle is a bit much.
As soon as we checked in and got to our room we used the ice maker on our floor without problems. The second day after spending the day walking the 16th Street Mall in 100 degree weather the ice maker could not fill the ice bucket. As I walked back to the room I noticed that there was some sort of rust/white coloring in the ice. I tried to explain to the housekeeping person about the ice, but only got a blank stare due to a language barrier. I went to another floor and hopefully got good ice. Now I wonder what was in the ice I used the day before.
Around 4:30AM on the first night we began hearing pounding or banging noises from the room next to the head of our bed. The next afternoon at around 5:00PM we heard some banging noises in the room on the other side of ours. Don't know what this was all about, but you'd think making this kind of noise in a modern hotel would require pounding directly on the wall. You could also hear conversations and other noises in the bathroom next to our bathroom.
Service people were very friendly especially the people working in the Altitude restaurant.
The room was clean, but nothing special other than the gorgeous view of the mountains. There was no mattress pad and the sheets came loose during the night. The mattress was comfortable.
Bottom line: Would I recommend staying in this hotel, well yes but ... expect what you see in modern society by greedy companies who don't care what you think and run for stock holders rather than customers. Bring your big coin purse for all the nickels and dimes you'll need.
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