W Edinburgh — Hotel in City of Edinburgh

I stayed here in April, and used my Bonvoy membership's upgrades to upgrade to a suite room. This was to celebrate an engagement, and I had written in advance to tell the hotel about this, to which they said they would take note and provide better rooms where possible and will provide drinks and a celebratory cake.

Good location, decent rooms, mostly horrible service and a racist reception at the W Lounge.

Rooms look good on the surface but have weird or impractical features on closer inspection: sofa looks good, but is hilariously narrow and uncomfortable door to the shower has a rubber piece reaching the ground so if you place a bathmat outside the shower it gets trapped by the door. yet, the rubber piece does not seal off the door, so the area outside still gets wet.

Horrible service: as noted above, the hotel noted that they will do their best to provide a better room. this did not happen. not only did they provide the lowest tier suite room available just to accommodate me using my suite night upgrades, they gave me a room whose bathtub faces an internal courtyard, directly into other rooms. on another wall, we had half a window across a 3m long wall. this is certainly not due to a lack of rooms - after i wrote to the hotel to ask about this, they provided a change to a deluxe suite. it was simply a lack of effort.

housekeeping was absolutely inconsistent. when we checked in, our room had no toilet rolls to be found. we booked the room for 2, but there was only 1 pair of slippers. there were also no hand towels over several days, housekeeping had completely different ways to deal with the bathub. on day 1, the bath mat was thrown at the back of the tub. on day 2, the wooden board across the tub was left on the floor. on day 3, the bath mat was missing.

reception was completely horrendous. when we called to ask for the toilet roll and slippers as above, we were condescendingly told to 'check the toilet'. we were even told that 'the shower and the toilet' are separate rooms as if we didn't know what a toilet looked like. when we asked for the missing pair of slippers, we were told that 'it's unisex' as if that was the point. after 5mins of back and forth, they finally relented and sent someone up with exactly the items we asked for - so this was certainly not an issue of miscommunication. The person who came up saw that we indeed had no toilet roll, was shocked, and came back with an extra to place under the sink as is standard.

on 2 nights, we went up to the W Lounge for drinks. on the first night, the lady at the reception was completely unresponsive - no smile, greeting, thank you, or even a simple acknowledgement. she simply gestured us to follow her to the table, after which her colleague took over to take our orders. when we were paying our bill, we saw her having a completely different attitude to a Caucasian couple - she wiped down an already-empty table for the couple, smiled at them and offered the seats to them. when they asked to change to high tables, she joyfully did so.

on the second night, the same lady told us that "the lounge is completely book and we cannot take anymore guests." this is despite a completely empty lounge behind her. she suggested us to go to Sushisamba, where we can then take the drinks up to the rooftop, which is where (if she wasn't lying) all the guests are gathered. We asked her how long the space is booked, she told us she didn't know even though she had an iPad right in front of her. Then she told us "i was told that everyone is very tired and so we cannot take more guests".

We went back to our room and called the reception to ask, who had to make their own call to the lounge to figure this out. After some back and forth and nearly 30minutes of waiting, it turned out that the lounge was booked out for a private event till closing time. They offered us to instead go to Joao's Place, which is a cocktail bar tucked away at the end of W Lounge. We accepted this and had a good time at Joao's Place, but this shouldn't have taken a third...

Paid for a five-star experience - did not receive it. As someone below highlights, would stay away until the W Hotel has got its act together.

We stayed here at the weekend for our honeymoon, having booked a "studio suite". Our room was available shortly after our check-in time, but we were a little surprised to find a promised "Bottle of Laurent-Perrier Champagne in the room upon arrival" was a little half bottle. Not that big a deal, it was still tasty - just a little smaller than described in the offer that convinced us to book a more expensive room.

The room we had was great, bed was huge and comfy (although the view of the roof of the shopping center meant the curtains remained closed!). The view from the roof of the hotel is amazing but for us it was short lived. Although we were told we could and should go to the roof to see it, security were sent to remove us from the roof shortly after we landed on the 12th floor. Apparently the roof was closed with no signs or locked doors to indicate this.

Although the hotel itself is very nice, it is currently understaffed to the extreme, and this is openly acknowledged by the few experienced staff working there. Apparently, untrained agency workers are filling in the gaps - and it shows. For breakfast the first morning, we waited 30 minutes for a coffee, 40 minutes for a cooked breakfast to arrive, and even longer for some pastries that we ordered at the start. You know when baked beans have a film on top that you aren't going to be having a good breakfast. But it wasn't just the beans - the whole thing was cold. And nobody ever came back to check how it was - there was one single waiter serving the whole restaurant. I think he was trying his best, but it would have been hard for him to cope on his own. On our way out, we expressed out disappointment to the waiter who was very apologetic and got the manager. By way of apology, the manager offered us a glass of champagne - at 11am. She might as well have said "Have a glass of champagne to wash down your disappointment."

This experience above was reflected in most of our stay at the hotel. The lounge bar had equally bad service, and it was almost impossible to order drinks without waving a flag at the service staff. But on balance, the bartenders did make exceedingly nice drinks.

With regards to the spa, we had tried to book a couples massage before arrival but this request was ignored. I was able to organize a solo massage for my new wife though. She enjoyed it. But highlighted how the Spa is still not set up properly - most of the beds that they have are temporary until they can get the proper equipment in.

As I was left on my own for an hour during this "couples massage" for one person, I wrote some feedback for the hotel and sent it via email. To their credit, they did discount the cost of the massage from our bill which I suppose went some way towards making up for the lack of five-star experience.

There is one redeeming feature of the W Hotel - the bartender of the speakeasy bar, Joao's Place. I can't remember his name (think it could have been Tony), but this guy knows service, knows his drinks, and will happily make you the tastiest bespoke cocktails all night. I would suggest only going to the W Hotel to drink with this guy. Spend the night with him, you will not regret it. I wish we had stayed at the Balmoral and done exactly this.

Also, I read in another review on Google that the hotel is having billing problems. On checkout, a £100 discount for booking the suite was not applied, and four days later I appear to have been overcharged on my credit card. I have still not received the promised bill that should show me what I have been charged for. But to be honest, I think what they are charging is robbery given the current standard of service...

Our first impressions were good as we were welcomed by a lovely man at the reception bar with a glass of fizz and we chatted about Edinburgh and the sights. |We went out for the day and came to check into our room late afternoon, the receptionist spoke very rapidly and we didn't feel orientated to the hotel eg no information about breakfast or the room itself. |We stayed in a superior room with balcony. The room itself was very dusty, the bed creaked and there were no slippers or flannels. We phoned down to get slippers as the floor was sticky but had to remind reception twice before they were finally delivered. The 'mystery' drawer with details of the minibar was hard to find without the receptionist informing us about it. On the first night we had a good experience in the 11th floor bar, with attentive waiting staff. |On our second night returning to the hotel around 21:30, we went to the same bar. The front of house told us that there was no availability and suggested we buy a drink and take it to our room! Whilst waiting for said drinks we noticed that there were a number of empty tables and I therefore enquired how long they were available for. I was told 45 minutes so I said we would use the table for that period of time. In my opinion that was a solution that benefited the productivity of the bar. After 15 minutes sat at the table, space then became available at the bar so we moved. We observed a table that was vacant the whole of the hour and half we were there. Another table occupied by 3 women for a considerable period of time, who only bought one drink and spent more time taking selfies than drinking. |As hotel residents we felt that more could have been done to accommodate us, than us having to find the solutions. |We opted to have breakfast in the hotel on Sunday morning, as we had to be at the airport. It was quite busy so we were sat at a high top table that rocked throughout our meal. We had the full Scottish breakfast but the bacon was missing . The food was dumped onto the table by the waiter who rushed off without asking if we wanted any condiments. I was able to ask another member of staff who brought the bacon, condiments and additional coffee which was all appreciated. |We returned to our room as we needed to check out to catch our plane. The key card had stopped working so my husband went to reception to get it reprogrammed. On return it still didn't work so he went back down and returned with the receptionist who couldn't open the door either. We then had to wait for an engineer. All of this took 30 minutes of waiting outside of the room. |This delay then meant we had to wait longer for the transport to the airport due to a surge in activity from a local sports game. |Quite stressful when you have a plane to catch. We arrived at the airport in the nick of time fortunately. |On check out we didn't have time to verbally give this feedback and then paid our bill. We would have liked to take off the service charge in view of our experience but there was no opportunity to do so and we didn't have time to negotiate this on check out.|On balance this was a disappointing stay at the W, as we'd had high expectations of the hotel hence our booking. We did email the management and we had a prompt response from the desk manager, however this response was quite corporate with a suggestion that we stay again so that we can be shown the high standard they expect to deliver. Our thoughts on that is that they should have got it right the first time - attention to detail is what I expect from a 5 star hotel...