I was looking forward to my stay at the Hyatt Centric but was sorely disappointed…read more
The first problem was that the photo on Hyatt's web page depicted a large, handsome castle-like building, but when I arrived the hotel was nothing like that. It is a boutique hotel in a non-descript building. So, that was immediately one star off for false advertising. I would not be staying in a castle after all. It went downhill from there.
I arrived in the middle of the afternoon, but there was noone at the desk. Completely empty. I stood there wondering what to do. I could have gone across the street to the Hampton, which in retrospect was the correct instinct. Then, I spied a young lady in the lobby and it occurred to me that if I seduced her, then I could stay in whatever room she had. A third option was that I could walk around the desk and check myself in if I could decipher their computer system. While weighing these options a security guard emerged from somewhere and went into the offices and returned with the desk clerk who was a disheveled GenZ not even wearing a tie and with food in his beard.
When I got to the fifth floor I could see something was amiss because the door where my room should be was actually a door to a tiny entranceway with two doors inside of it. I soon discovered the reason for this bizarre arrangement: the room was once a normal corner suite, but they had split it into two small rooms. Consequently, my "deluxe" room was a tiny 200 square foot apartment. I happened to have a ruler in my briefcase, so I actually measured it: 10' x 20'. At this point the astute reader would be wondering, "How could you have a king-sized bed in a 10' x 20' room?" The answer is that it was not a real king-sized bed as advertised but a California king. So, a guest over 6' tall would not fit in this bed. Everything in the room had been downsized to squeeze into this tiny space that would make a Motel 6 room look large by comparison.
My next move was to open the curtains because the troglodyte maids (where do they get them?) followed the usual practice of closing all the curtains to make the room into a cave. However, this proved impossible because stops had been deliberately been installed to prevent the curtains from being opened more than half way??!!! It was becoming clear this was going to be bad.
The desk was correspondingly small, like everything else, only about 16" deep. Of course there were no plugins in the desk. The only ports in the whole room were a single type A nd type C in one of the munchkin-sized end tables. The refrigerator was likewise just a cube fridge, not even a minifridge, and was 40-degrees. Obviously, there was no minibar or sodas--you are just dreaming if want service like that. The whole place was done up in a kitschy, highly effeminate style as though that were some pretext for making everything else inconvenient, small and impractical. For example, there were three brightly colored coat hooks in the shape of the rear end of a dog. "Oh, gee, that is so cute! It totally makes me forget what a crappy room this is!!" If I could just transform myself into a valley girl, then it would be oh so rad.
The haute design did not stop at dog asses. The super genius interior designer had the brilliant and innovative idea of improving the already miniature closet by eliminating silly non-essentials like a door and positioning the hanger bar front to back instead of side to side, so instead of being 20" long, it was only 8" deep--enough space for about 6 jackets or shirts. I was only staying 3 nights, but I still ended up laying out two shirts on the tiny coffee table because no dresser, duh. Of course, what this artistic Einstein forgot is that if you stack garments front to back, then you have remove all the other hangers to get access to a shirt or coat in the back.
By now, I was ready to give the hotel one star, but decided to give the bathroom a last chance. At first, it looked bad. The toilet seat was one of those cheap, hollow plastic ones like you see in hospitals. The shower door inexplicably had no towel bar, just a minimalist pull knob. Nor was there a towel rod on the wall even though there was a good 3' of space where one could have been placed. Not only that but the lights were on some kind of system that turned them off automatically, so infuriatingly I had to be consequently turning the lights back on the whole time of my stay. At last I tried the shower and hooray! it completely unexpectedly had good water flow, so I gave it a star for that.
The rest of the hotel followed the same pattern of annoyance and incompetence. For example, there was no self-service mart, just a glass display case with the snack items which had to be ordered from the (non-existent) desk clerk. I ordered a well-deserved bloody mary at the bar, but the "bartender" did not know how to make it. How can you not know how to make a bloody mary?
Anyway, the lesson here: get the square footage ahead of time.
