74 State, an Ascend Collection hotel

04/28/08

Beautiful hotel, Not the best service

by albany25 at Citysearch

The hotel has been a great addition to Albany. Coming from Boston, the land of all things posh, this was a welcomed addition. As part of a late Valentines Day celebration with my boyfriend, we stayed an evening. In the lounge, we each got a drink. I ordered the house Cabernet. After those drinks, we went up to the bar and ordered a bottle of the Cabernet I had ordered to be sent up to our room. The tricky server knocked on our hotel room door, started up a conversation with me immediately, so to avoid talking to my boyfriend as he passes him the bill. Opens the bottle and pours a glass for me as he explains that he took the liberty of choosing a much better wine for us, a "moderately more expensive" bottle...I went from the house Cabernet to a $50 bottle of wine. Shady move. One more low-light to the stay was the early morning awakening. A housekeeper bangs on our door, screams "house keeping" at 7:30 am on a Saturday morning! We yell back from the bed, "Can you please come back later?" That should have been the end of it, but no, she replies with "What I'm sayin' is I'm tryin' to leave by noon" We respond with, "Can you please come back later" Her complaints trailed off down the hallway. So all in all, I just made it sound horrible, but it wasn't bad, they just needed to get their staff in check, that was a year ago, so I am hoping it's improved. Oh, yeah, we waiting 30 minutes for our car to be brought around to the front....still, it was a good time-entertaining, to say the least.

• Pros: rooms, accomodations
• Cons: service, staff