Last weekend, I had a most excellent time in San Diego. My girlfriend grew up there, and she has a regular appointment once a month in the area. Since we just hit our one year dating anniversary, I decided to look for hotels in downtown San Diego and see what kind of deals I could get.
San Diego Downtown Gaslamp District Hotels
Hotels in the gaslamp district can be a bit pricey, but the area makes up for it. When you can find a good deal, you want to jump at it. We had dinner plans at Candela’s, which was (according to my girlfriend) voted the #1 romantic restaurant in San Diego. The ambiance was pretty good, and the food was amazing! So to go back to our hotel and relax, maybe watch a movie, would have been ideal.
When visiting friends in San Francisco, I used Hotwire to land the Parc 55 hotel. It was amazing and truly worthy of the four star rating. So I turned to Hotwire once again for our San Diego excursion and found a four star hotel for $100 for the night! I pounced on the deal.
Truthfully, the hotel was not bad enough to ruin the weekend, but I would hesitate to give it a three star rating, much less a four. And evidently others have felt that way, since it dropped half a star since the time I booked it to getting a “rate your hotel” email after the trip. Figures.
At first glance, the room was okay. It certainly did not impress, but it was adequate. Upon our romantic dinner (and taking a bike taxi ride back to the hotel), we were pretty exhausted from a long day and just wanted to relax.
First, the room was frigid. No big deal for most hotel rooms, just turn up the heat. Except the heater did not work. It just blew cold air. It said it was on, but every setting we tried blew cold air. So we let it run for awhile, thinking it must need to heat up. Nada. Just cold air making the room even colder. The only thing which warmed the room up a little was shutting it off. At 11:30 at night we did not want to have a technician in the room and decided to deal with the cold.
So I got ready for bed. As I brushed my teeth, I realized the water was making an extremely loud clunking as the water went down the drain. I’m not exagerating to say it if were a human voice, you would think someone was yelling at you. Clug. Clug. Clug. Clug.
Just when I thought it quit, the clugging went through a whole nuther set of pipes underneath the bath tub. Clug. Clug. Clug. Clug. And it kept going and going and going much longer than I felt I had the water running.
The next morning, the shower provided a whole new kind of fun.
The first visual cue something was off… well, I snapped a picture from my Treo:
No big deal, after all it doesn’t really affect the function of taking a shower, especially if you are not handicapped. Just a little visual annoyance for our supposedly luxury hotel experience.
Of course, then there’s the shower head. Yeah, a “four star hotel” has the type of shower head you hold in your hand? I suppose that can be a convenience for some people, but I personally think it’s tacky. But, at least you can mount it high and use it like a regular shower, right?
Maybe you need a closer look:
Yeah, that’s a broken holder. So my downtown San Diego luxury hotel experience included me holding the shower head the entire time I bathed.
To be fair, the exercise room and the pool were slightly above average. Of course, we used them right before we checked out, and even though we called for an extended checkout (which they would not give us the night before… told us we had to call back in the morning), we were locked out of our room. So I got to stand in the lobby of our luxury hotel in my bathing suit waiting for personnel which was nowere to be found to get a replacement key.
The good news is, my girlfriend is so amazing all of this stuff bothered me more after the fact (though I was perturbed enough, obviously, to snap off a few pics). We had a wonderful weekend in spite of the Doubletree Hotel in downtown San Diego.
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