Amway Grand Plaza, Curio Collection by Hilton — Hotel in Grand Rapids

My stay at the Grand Army was one of the worst I’vs ever had! It LITERALLY was one FECKLESS mess after another!||First, it started off with me trying to select my room on Thursday. When I noticed the floors were very low, I called the front desk to see why. I spoke to Chase who could not have been nicer! He mentioned he put notes on the reservation. His kindness, compassion and professionalism made me feel excited to come to your hotel! Unfortunately, this was quickly evaporated when I spoke to Miranda the next morning. I called to verify that I had received the tenth floor luxury suite. She puts me on hold for a very long time, comes back and says “yes they are still there.” It struck me odd that she did this without even asking me who I was. I said “but you didn’t even ask me my name.” She sarcastically replied, “umm your caller ID showed up.” Now mind you, this is the very first time I’ve ever been addressed in such a way. All I can say is….”ok…?” She just hangs up. I was a bit confused but even more, I was taken aback! I wait a little bit and I decide to call back. It’s my guess that she was still watching the caller ID because the phone rang for a minute or two and no one answered. I eventually hung up. It was not until I arrived that I realized that I never received the tenth floor request that Chase put on my reservation. Understandably so that room requests are just that: requests. Meaning you may/ or may not get it. However, I do not think there’s any reason to be disrespectful and rude like Miranda was.||When we arrived to the hotel, the dropoff area was too crowded. I could not remember if we had paid for parking for our stay, so I decided to call the front desk to verify. When I called, I spoke to someone named Andrea. I explained to her that I had just arrived, but wasn’t sure if we had paid for parking on our reservation. This time, I immediately told her my last name. In similar fashion, she immediately said “no.” I said, “ma’am, you look me up fast?” She again immediately said, “yes, and I don’t see anything!!! Do you need anything else?!” As if she’s busy and has better things to do. We decided to just brave the traffic and park in the garage. ||When we arrive to the front desk, I am greeted by a woman named Erin. Similar to Chase, she’s also couldn’t have been any kinder and professional! When she ask if I was ok, she immediately noticed my disgruntled look on my face. She then asked “are you okay sir?” I proceeded to tell her that I wasn’t pleased with my recent two interactions with the front desk. I go on to explain my recent one was with a woman named Andrea. As soon as I said her name, Erin looked to her right. The woman standing next to her said “that’s me!” I explained to her that I didn’t appreciate her tonality nor her professionalism. She immediately became startled, surprised and defensive. Erin was very apologetic and offered a gift card. I outright refused to take it, but she insisted. In my opinion, she did a great job and I’m very for attempt to deescalate the situation. For there, we get our keys and head to the room. Optimistically thinking the issues are resolved, we later find out they are only beginning.||Upon arrival to the room, we immediately notice hair EVERYWHERE! And when I say everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE! There was hair on the bathroom countertop, hair on the bathroom floor. Hair in the toilet. Hair on the bed comforter. Hair on the sofa. Hair on the floor. It’s soon disgusting and overwhelming, IMMEDIATELY get on the phone with housekeeping and explain that this room looks as if it has never been cleaned!!! In addition, we requested a few extra items to the (more towels, pillows, robes…which we couldn’t find/get). Fast forward to 20 minutes later……STILL NOTHING!! In addition, we have an ice cream cake and are wondering if your hotel has a freezer. Front desk says they are going to “send a technician to assist.” Instead they send a housekeeper. The housekeeper explains to us that they mixed her up with someone else she leaves. We call 10 minutes or so later. This time we’re going “what is going on?!” So we call back but this time we are not happy. We stress that we need to freeze our cake since it’s ice cream and we MUST have our room clean!! They send up the SAME housekeeper who says “there must have been a mistake earlier because they just sent me a message saying your room wasn’t properly cleaned. By then we were furious! Not only could we not relax after working and driving from Chicago but now we have to deal with all of this terrible service?! We muster up the strength to leave so see can re-clean the room. We decided to deal with management tomorrow.||After eating dinner we requested our cake be returned to our room. Robert was nice enough to make it happen. While asking him to bring the cake up to the room, also asked him to bring me the manager info because we have several problems with the room. One of the managers I asked for was the general manager. Even though I did consider Robert a nice and professional individual, I was very crossed that he refused to give me the name and contact info of his general manager. When he finally came to my room, I asked him flat out why he refused. He shakily replied, “ if I did sir, I could get in a lot of trouble!” I’m sorry, but I have never heard of ANY HOTEL where they are not allowed to give out the name and email of the general manager. That is preposterous and something, then I still find not only flabbergasting, but seriously disturbing! After Robert dropped off the cake, he went back downstairs. I later called downstairs, afterwards and let Robert know I was not happy with his refusal to tell me his general manager’s name/contact info. We then had our cake, took a shower and decided to watch some TV afterwards. This brings us to the worst part of the stay!||After taking a shower we decided to take a shower. After showering 🧼 , we turned on the TV. My god…..we’ve never seen anything like this! It seemed as if something or someone hit the screen. We immediately called downstairs to explain the issue. Front desk supervisors Mateo and Angie came upstairs to take a look. They themselves were appalled by what they saw. We were too tired to go anywhere else, there were no more suites like ours available in the hotel so we decided to stay for the night and deal with it in the morning. As a result, I typed up an email to the front desk supervisor as well as the director of rooms and demanded that I speak with them first thing in the morning. ||The following morning, we went downstairs to have breakfast at “The kitchen with Wolfgang Puck.” Unsurprising at this point, without going into too much detail, food was subpar. I will save that review for the restaurant itself. While we were eating, we saw the email coming from Shakira. Upon reading it, we appreciative but also taken aback at the same time. On one hand, we appreciated her sincerity for all the woes/problems we experienced in our room. On the other hand, we were saying to ourselves “are they really only going to offer only half off for the entire stay?” As my girlfriend explained to me that night, the damage to the TV alone gave us some indication that perhaps our safety was in jeopardy!! That’s not, including the other woes/issues we experience with the suite. This is not to even mention the issues we experienced BEFORE we got to the room! The fact that we had to deal with how disrespectful front desk staff members Andrea and Miranda were! We decided that we would finish our breakfast and immediately here to the front desk to talk to Shakira. ||After breakfast, we arrived at the front desk and met with Shakira, the front desk manager. One thing we can say about her is, similar to Chase and Erin, could not have been nicer and more professional. As I mentioned to her “ this isn’t anything against you, personally. However, we are completely appalled by everything we have experienced!” we explain to her that while we appreciate the gesture to waive the previous night’s stay, we take the fair (and right) thing to do is to waive the entire two night stay. She explained to us that she can’t do that and it would need to be approved by her supervisor Lindsay, the Director of Rooms. I explain to her that if they do not, then we’ll head over to their competitor JW Marriott. Shakira then says something a manager should NEVER EVER do!! She says “we can arrange that for you!” Ok first and foremost, anyone will tell you that you should not offer to send disgruntled guests away. Especially after you screwed up!! Second, I even told her this, we didn’t need her to “arrange that” for us. We can do that ourselves! This told us everything we needed to know and more. We adjourn and then headed to our room.||My girlfriend is very uncomfortable, uneasy and upset about the entire situation. She explains to me that she feels they are trying to finesse their way out of the this horrible ordeal and frankly I agree with her. As a result, I called my contact over at JW Marriott to see if they had any suites. They had one available and explained they would hold it for me. I wrote Shakira and explained to her and Lindsay two scenarios: either they comp us for the entire stay (it’s the least they can do) or we leave. We go downstairs…..Shakira explains they her boss offered 1/2 off + champagne. Ok wow. Are you a hotel manager or a used car salesman? After all that transpired they try to haggle / barter with us? Seriously? How offensive to ASSUME a guest drinks alcohol. The proper way to handle this would like have been to say, “ I’m not sure if you drink alcohol or not, but I would love to send champagne to your room.” Irregardless, that’s a moot point for this particular situation. The conversation should’ve went “You know what Mr Austin, we completely fell short of not only our standards of the Curio brand, but Hilton hotels and Resorts in its entirety. Therefore, we would like to completely comp your stay.” it’s as I told Shakira, I can understand if it was just the hair, here and there, but the damaged TV alone merits a comped stay!! Super 8 motels have TVs that work and aren’t damaged. Are they that desperate for money? ||I said to myself I wouldn’t repeat this, but I think I will. Months ago when I called the hotel, a couple of their front desk people said to me FLAT OUT, “If you want the best luxury hotel in this city, you shouldn’t stay here. You should stay next door at the JW Marriott.” Well I would like to amend that statement and say that I recommend that NO ONE stay at the Amway Grand Plaza! I would even recommend guests go to the surrounding hotels downtown as well. Just avoid this hotel. They are God awful! If this situation doesn’t give you pause, I don’t know what will! I cannot in good conscience recommend this hotel to anyone who is looking to stay in Grand...

We booked the luxury suite for 2 days this past weekend. Despite paying more for luxury accommodations, the service and the room did not stack up. Here are some of our experience: I was travelling with my family and our dog in 2 cars because of the amount of luggage we had to bring. I showed up first in my car that I had planned to park, check in, unload my car and go park it at friend's house. I told the head front door person what I was doing and he told me I couldn't park my car in front long enough to perform all those tasks. He offered to load my items on a cart and gave me a claim ticket. That would have been fine but he had a real attitude doing it. I got into my room. We stayed in the same room 7 years ago and there had been no updates. Other than 7 years of wear and tear that had not been addressed, the room looked the same. I was a bit disappointed that I was paying more money for a poorly maintained idea of luxury from 7 years ago. I tried to call down to the front desk for a roll away bed and more towels but the every line was busy. It remained busy for the rest of my visit. The bell person brought up my luggage and he was nice enough so I requested the roll away bed and more bedding and towels from him. He agreed and nothing was brought up until later in the night after I went down to the desk to request these items. My family arrived and we started to get ready to go down to the pool. That's when we discovered that the bathroom door did not lock. My teenage daughter couldn't get dressed without my little boy constantly walking in on her. I was expecting a fully functioning room. My family and I decided to go to dinner and get odds and ends at the grocery while we were out. When we got back, I was dropping off my wife and kids up front and I was going to park the car after that. The same head front door person angrily told us to move our car over to the side and told us we had to move our car when it was taking too for us to gather our things and unload. Because the pool towels have to be left in the pool area, we used room towels to wrap up our kids on the way up the room. This left us with no clean towels. After the last time I walked down to the front desk because the line was busy calling from the room, they told me to text requests from here on out. So I requested more towels through text. They confirmed that they were going to bring some, but 2 hours later and we had not received the towels. I asked them for a timeline and was told they could not give us a timeline. They finally brought our items and we were delayed to go start our day waiting for towels. My wife and I wanted to relax in the room tub and turn on the spa jets. We couldn't find the switch to turn the jets on so again I texted the front desk and was told that the jets don't work. So disappointing.

The location was great but everything else was subpar. We honestly did not enjoy our visit to Grand Rapids as much because of the service. Unfortunately, we will not be back to the Amway to stay. It used to...

Beautiful hotel, great location, awful service.

My friend booked this hotel for a bachelorette party and from the start, the reservation was a mess. She got three rooms: two connecting, one separate.

Day 1: the number of days booked were wrong for all the rooms. They told us they corrected it, but found out later they didn’t. They also said that everyone was checked in, which also wasn’t true. They also told my friend we could go early to decorate for the bachelorette party, but the girls decorating were told they couldn’t check in and something happened with their key cards that they needed to be reset.

Day 2: Two girls checked out of one room - the front desk got it confused with the other adjoining that was still occupied and when the cleaners showed up, they called my friend demanding why they hadn’t left yet. Then they backtracked and said the room also only had a one night reservation, when it was supposed to be 2, which made it sound like it was our fault. They called and wanted us to leave our reserved bachelorette events to come resolve it! We told them no - that we tried many times to fix this issue and we were going to have our events. After we got back, the key cards failed and needed to be reset again.

After this, I got nervous and went to pay for my room separately (I was in the separate room), worrying there were issues. They didn’t check me in! They had me as a “no-show” and I was sleeping in a still rentable “empty” room that they freely handed out active key cards for, which in hindsight, was scary. They had to reset my keycards to “renew” the reservation, which didn’t make any sense.

Day 3: When I went to check out, it turned out my card had been left as a default to pay for everything, even though it was supposed to be on my friends’ card. I double checked every charge and asked for receipts - which was good, because I checked my bank account a day later and it shows I have 5 transactions, when I only made 2! The hold is there - they removed my payment for some reason for my room and I have two mystery charges that I now need to deal with their accounting team on because no one knows anything.

Overall, it was one of the most unprofessional experiences that I’ve had at a hotel, especially one that touts how high end and bougie it is. The front desk people were usually pleasant, but had the attitude of “why didn’t you resolve this sooner? This is on you”.

I don’t know if they have new people or a new system, but it was a struggle all weekend worrying if our cards would work, if we had rooms to come back to, or having the front desk call us to ask us to keep resolving issues that they kept telling us were fixed.

It really is a beautiful venue - cool pool and pickle ball court, nice location to bars and events; it’s just a shame they don’t have their crap together to correct reservations and don’t mind keeping customers on edge the whole visit (and even after you leave, apparently).

If you go here, I highly, highly advise you get receipts...