Infinity Tower Suites, Makati — Hotel in Makati

If you've seen my reviews of the Picasso, you'll know that when I visit Manila, I prefer to stay in Salcedo. The Infinity Tower Suites is well situated in a spot where I like to stay. For me, most everything I need to attend to is just outside their doors.||The problem (for me) with Salcedo is that it's a bit of an older development and Infinity's age shows. The interiors are very 1980s that have not been updated. It's a mixed residential and hotel or rental or something (not sure how to accurately categorize it) but people live there and not just stay a few nights.||I had room 2206 and it was just okay. A queen-sized bed with not very quality beddings. Everything was sparse with tiled floors and generic furniture. Nothing even suggesting a sense of luxury. There was ample storage space to place your clothes and baggage and the bathroom is spacious, but again, nothing to suggest of luxury. Then there's the lighting. This is typical of Philippine residential architecture - a lack of lighting. One bulb in the bath means everything is kinda dark. Same for the living area.||The thing about the design and fixtures - it's not about not being luxurious, it's just that it's not even about comfort. They needed a bed, a table, some chairs to call it a "room" so they got those - with no thought about comfort or actually enjoying occupying any of the furniture.||And then there's the Air Conditioning. The unit has to be straight out of the 1980s. In a place where heat and humidity is oppressive, you want very robust AC. I want the sweat to be chased away when I enter my room. That is not what happens here. The AC is old and weak, leaving you miserable. Sure, I guess if you're Filipino and used to this kind of thing, this might be pretty good, but for a foreigner? Oh, no. It's miserable. Sometimes it works better. Other times not.||The public space on the floors are also dark and old. The elevators are slow and one doesn't work. The staff is nice. The front door guard is always pleasant and friendly. But it's odd that not only does he have to unlock the door when you enter, but he also has to unlock the door when you leave. There is a nice restaurant called Wholesome Table in the lobby that serves "healthy" foods (I did not eat there this trip - I'm okay with eating non-stop lechon kawali for a couple days).||So the location is excellent. You're in the midst of the best part of Salcedo Village. Access to anywhere is easy. Infinity Suites has so much going for it in terms of location but it's not really a comfortable place to stay - and I mean that in terms of when I come back to the room, I'd like to sit down and unwind kind of comfort. It's not like that at all.||Because of the great location, I have to ask myself if I want to stay here again? I stayed because I got a great price on the room. Is it worth it? Not really. After a long day of work, entertaining, or even just hanging out with friends, you want to go back to your place to kick back and unwind. This is...

This was easily the worst hotel that I have stayed in, in Manila. I hope they read this and improve.

When we checked in on the first day, we were greeted by a cockroach when entering our room. I took a photo, killed it, and then went down to reception to ask for a new room.

The receptionist said she would move us to a floor without cockroaches. We went to the new room and it all seemed good until about an hour later, when a giant cockroach decided to go for a walk in the dining area.

I went down to reception and complained and she laughed and said we could move into the 30th floor which has all newly renovated rooms (important for later). She swore there would be no cockroaches but we couldn’t move in until the next day.

That night my wife found a cockroach on the toilet seat and another in the bathtub. I found another in the morning, so we couldn’t wait to move to the 30th floor.

So when we get to our room on the 30th, the door key didn’t work and they have to let us in with a master key. It was like this for 2 days until they could fix it. That means we had to have someone from engineering let us in when we needed to get into our room. Super annoying.

They finally fixed the door but that night it rained, and the windows didn’t keep out the water, so we had a flood near the bed when we woke in the morning and had to dry out one of our bags that was left too close. This doesn’t feel like an upgraded room to me or my wife.

Also, the rooms on the 30th don’t have cable tv, just a Netflix login. Since I don’t have Netflix, I couldn’t watch tv for 2 weeks because I don’t speak Tagalog (they only had local tv channels and Netflix for people to log into).

My wife and I were disgusted with the cockroach infestation that the hotel appears to have along with the seemingly disinterested response from hotel staff. Laughing at the fact that the rooms have cockroaches doesn’t seem customer friendly to me.

We also had one final stay at the hotel before leaving as we had booked and paid in advance and the hotel refused to cancel the booking and refund us. So when we returned after celebrating New Years in a different town, they tried to put us back in the very first room that we had ever had (the one where the cockroach greeted us when opening the door). Thankfully my wife remembered the old room number so we refused to take it. So they put us on the 23 floor.

This room didn’t appear to have a cockroach that we saw, but the bathroom floor tiles were so badly cracked and when you walked on them, water would seep up from below, which was super yucky.

This hotel appears to be going down hill so rapidly that it’s amazing so many people have it an “excellent” rating. Any hotel with a cockroach infestation, doors and windows that don’t work, no cable tv, and cracked tiles letting in water isn’t something I want to pay money for.

My wife and I will...

The hotel owners/management have given up. They don't care, and that attitude seems to have affected the staff, who don't seem to care all that much. Really, the whole place is pretty depressing, and I can't imagine anyone working here much enjoys it. If you look back at comments over the past few years on google maps you'll see the management used to respond to low reviews in a fairly personal way. But over the past year they seem to have switched to doing a copy/paste reply with the same message each time. Worse still, the copy paste answer seems to be taken from other places on the internet with some small modifications. That's a good sign of not caring. With that, here's my review.....

When checking into the infinity hotel you may wait a long time to actually get your room. I can't say you'll wait an infinity amount of time, but you may wait a good 30 minutes. (They told us there was a problem with the original room they had for us, and they needed to do housekeeping on the 2nd room because the previous guest just recently left - strange since it was nearly 10pm. I guess this hotel allows for really late checkouts!)

While checking in, we asked if we could have a late checkout. The staff asked, "2pm?" I said that would be good. Then she said, "Unfortunately we can't do 2pm because we need to prepare the room for the next guest. Would 1pm be ok?" Now I was confused. Why did she even ask us about 2pm? And didn't the guest before us just recently check out? (Remember, it was nearly 10pm when we were checking in!)

Once we checked in, it was time to ride up an old dirty elevator, then tap our key card to enter a warm and spacious, but somewhat unclean room. You'll want to bring slippers (or at least wear dark socks) or you'll be shocked by how dark your feet (or light colored socks) get from walking around. Or better yet - just keep your shoes on, as apparently every other guest must have done. Yuck.

The refrigerator in the room was old but not cold. In fact it wasn't even plugged in. The aircon unit in the bedroom worked, but the one for the rest of the room didn't. The bathroom was clean but in poor shape, with a sink that had cracked (and peeling) coating on it. The tub had damage on the coating too, and what looked like drops of blood in it, though upon closer inspection appeared to be deeper holes exposing the layer beneath.

The bed was comfortable, so there's at least something positive about the stay. The wifi didn't work for us, but it was late and time to sleep. Finally, if you see the same copy/paste reply to my review that the management has been doing to low reviews over the past year, then it probably means they didn't actually read my review. But who knows! Maybe they will read it and respond with...