Hilton Garden Inn Bethesda Downtown — Hotel in Bethesda

This has got to be the worst hotel experience that I have ever had and that is saying a lot. Considering the Hilton brand coupled with the location "Bethesda", one would expect better than Motel 6 service.

The day I arrived, I waited for one and half hours for my room. When I finally got into the room, I found out that the room that I booked was given away. I booked a king room and was given a double instead. The front desk said that the block of people who were sponsoring the event that I was attending got priority over me even though I had booked my room weeks in advance. The person who checked me in, proceeded to enter false information into the system which stated that they offered to move me, and I refused their offer. WOW!! I only found this out when I complained to the front desk manager the next morning. That was disappointing.

There was no heat in my room even though temperatures outside were 40 and below. I first complained about the room's temperature after I entered the very cold room and could not adjust the thermostat. They made 4 attempts and failed, and they asked the front desk to move me, and they could not because there were no more rooms available. I was not offered another solution. I was told that they would try to move me the next day. I complained the next day and let the front desk know that I needed the heat to be fixed because I was freezing the night before and I could not endure that again. They sent someone from engineering again and they again failed to resolve the issue. He did something and said to give the system time to recalibrate. I waited for a couple of hours, and nothing changed. It was starting to get late, so I called the front desk again about the heating issue. They sent someone else from engineering to try to resolve the issue. At this time, the temperature was dropping (into the 30’s) and it was getting later, I had been at a conference all day, I had not had dinner, so I was ready to leave. He asked me: “if I can find you a space heater to at least make you comfortable for the night will you stay?” I told him yes and he came back 20 minutes later with a space heater that he stole from one of their offices. THANK GOD for Mr. Covel!!!! This gentleman was so concerned about me leaving due to the poor experience that he went above and beyond to make sure that I did not freeze that night. It is because of him that this hotel is getting two stars.

The first issue I had was that I waited 1.5 hours for them to have my room ready and there were stains on the bathroom sink. This looks like toothpaste stains or something like that. I told the front desk about that, and I thought that housekeeping would get it the next time that they came, and NOPE! The stain that you see in the pictures was still there after housekeeping came and left. The tv, the dresser and other things were very dusty. I wanted to take a shower, and there was no shower gel. Luckily, I brought some from home. I thought when housekeeping comes the next day, they will refill it. If you are seeing a pattern here, you should have guessed the answer was NOPE! Nothing was in the container, and I checked to see if she filled it up. The second morning, I wanted to iron my dress that I wanted to wear and the ironing board was broken. I deliberately left it out so that housekeeping would see it, and maybe you guessed it already, NOPE! My final night, I was moved to a King room. When I got there the heat was working but again, this time there was still no bodywash, the shampoo and conditioner that I saw in my room is posted in the pictures for you to see. I was flabbergasted. The front desk gave me two complimentary breakfast vouchers for my troubles. I think it is needless to say, that the Hilton will NOT be at the top of my list for any of my...

The location is quite convenient, it is nice being able to walk a couple blocks and make it to the red line metro. There are plenty of other cons however.

The pictures that are currently up do not accurately reflect what the hotel has to offer. The mezzanine and shop are completely bare bones. The pool is inoperable and a staff member told me the hotel did not have a pool. The only drinks that are available in the cooler next to the front desk is a couple of sodas and water. The laundry room only takes coins even though there's a sign that says they take card. There's no change machine and the front desk employee told me I should go ask the Hyatt to break my dollar bills into quarters for the washer/dryer as they have no cash on hand. The laundry room also claims that there is detergent available in the shop. There is not. My first night there, my bathroom mirror was flashing extremely fast. The person I was staying with has epilepsy, so he was unable to shower with the lights on. We had to call the front desk the next day and have a technician take the entire mirror apart. There were multiple instances where my key card randomly stopped working, and the laundry room locked us out. These are all major issues with the facility that could be fixed quickly.

Additionally employee training seems to be something that needs to be improved. I'm a gold member, so I used my food credit to buy soda bottles. Nobody seemed to know exactly how much of a credit I could get or how many sodas I could get. There's no prices on the cooler so we just relied on the staff to tell us. On one occasion a staff member said we got $20 another said $10. One said we could get 3 sodas and a water with $10 another said we could get 2 sodas and a water. Nobody seemed to have been trained on what prices or procedure was.

Most of the staff were extremely kind. Room service was fantastic and everyone minus one staff member we came in contact with were kind. There is one staff member that was extremely unpleasant and unprofessional at every interaction we had with her. I told her that my floors ice machine didn't work, and I was wondering where I could find another ice machine. She told me every floor has an ice machine. I told her I needed her help to get to the ice machine as your key card restricts which floors you can go to. She sighed and sent me back to the floor with the non-working ice machine. We asked for cups and coffee as room service hadn't cleaned the room in a couple days. She responded with okay and immediately hung up the phone. We called back later to explain we didn't get the coffee and she groaned, said okay and hung up the phone. The first interaction I chalked up to her having a bad day, but this was every single interaction. It got to the point we didn't want to call the front desk because she would be extremely irritated when we asked for completely normal requests.

All in all the hotel needs some serious work and the pictures do not accurately depict what the...

First things first: it should be considered criminal to charge for parking at a hotel. I can appreciate there’s probably some sort of back story, like the parking garage is owned by someone else, but this adds a cool $100 to your weekend stay. And lucky us for accidentally having a wedding the same weekend the parking garage was being “cleaned” and guests were told to park else where. But I digress..checking in was a great foreshadowing experience to the entire visit, as we witnessed the coldest exchange between the woman at the front desk and an actual paying customer who was just asking if there were any good places for a drink. Woman at the desk could not have been more dismissive to the question, not offering any suggestions when clearly that’s what was being asked, just shrugged and responded “yeah.” The room itself was fine for the first 15 minutes until you notice that the air conditioning is not working. We dealt with it for the night, but in the morning I asked them to take a look while we were out. After sight seeing, we did in fact come back to a cool room, unfortunately what quick fix they had done wore off and by the next day the air conditioning was out again. Moving on..with four people in a hotel room, you tend to go through towels at a quicker pace. Unfortunately for us, it appears the hotel swears off maid service because in the three days we never were visited by anyone to refill toilet paper, towels or soap (ignoring of course the fact the shampoo/conditioner weren’t even full to begin with). Oh wait! Maid service did come..the morning we were checking out…at 8:30am. Had to call several times just for towels. On our last full day in the hotel, we came back to our room only to discover BOTH keycards had abruptly stopped working with no explanation. After going back to the front desk, we were told “yeah that’s been happening.” I think we would have been able to shrug it off, but unfortunately because all but one elevator was out of order, the ordeal ends up taking so long to go back downstairs and up again. Also, the fact that full garbage bags sat in the hallway for two days (next to trash cans) by the elevators doesn’t really scream cleanliness. Look, I don’t write reviews of places because, also working in the service industry, I can understand things just happen…but this was just the absolute worst experience in a hotel. If you’re considering staying here, I genuinely urge you to check out LITERALLY...