The Waterfront Beach Resort, a Hilton Hotel — Hotel in Huntington Beach

Giving Hilton a chance since Marriott is absent on this coast.|Ok, here we go.||The feature restaurant, Henry’s is reasonably good, probably a 4 out of 5. Also a patio with fire pits for groups of 4-6. Nice! It turns out they are closed on M / T, in the heart of June and July tourist season, the time of year when nobody notices that it’s Monday or Tuesday - it’s just a day on their vacation where a pretty cool restaurant is closed.|This is the only outdoor bar open in the evening, that is, if the restaurant is open.|The other restaurant is called “Cabo Wabo”. Yes you guessed it, the resort’s second tier restaurant is named for a 35 year old Sammy Hagar song.|The name unfairly makes the place seem dated; “Cabo Wabo the restaurant” seems to have a fairly well set up sports bar, the food was pretty good (though for dinner the first evening I ordered the wrong thing - lobster tacos - skimpy, the shrimp tacos looked much better), lunch was a nice burger. They should consider a rebrand and donate the Hagar merch back to the Hard Rock Cafe if that’s still in business.||There are plenty of nearby restaurants and shopping on Main Street and in a shopping center half block away, would recommend those for cost / value.||There’s both a kid pool and an adult pool.|Towels were plentiful at both.|“Cabo” is adjacent to the kid pool.|The kid pool is crazy but that’s expected. The adult pool is calm, except on weekends when they insist on setting up a DJ. ||Drinks are available at both and the kid pool makes the intelligent choice of a walk up bar rather than servers weaving through a mess of families.||Adult pool service was only ok. Weekday there might be one server so you may need to walk up to the bar on your own. Bartenders were all very helpful.|Drinks were well made, high priced like any resort so we’ll let that slide.||Both pools struggle to match the people capacity of the resort - i.e. the ratio of available pool area to peak hour pool guests seems to not quite match up.||If the demo of your fellow vacationers is important to you this place skews more Destin than San Diego.||We stayed in the Huntington tower, it was fine, the beds were very comfortable. It was notable that there was a tub, this indicates the tower to be rather aged. There was some flaking on whatever refinishing work had been done on the tub so possibly some cutting of corners.||Was stated by some other guests that the Dolphin tower is newer / nicer. My only experience was the workout room in the Dolphin tower which was in good shape with plenty of newer machines.||Housekeeping personnel were great, very kind.|The valet pickup area was generally packed with cars but they did a good job of pulling up your car relatively quick.|||Nitpicks:|Had two rooms but was unable to get adjoining - perhaps that is an issue being a new Hilton user, maybe this choice is hidden on the website.|The TV was terribly glitchy. In comparison to Marriott there was no ability to link to Netflix or other streamers. This has been my experience with other recent Hilton visits as well.|Room either ‘smelled of the ocean’ or of ‘mildew’ - one of the two.||While there is a lot of promo on the website of being ‘close to the beach’ there’s not a ton of effort done to educate you on where you can check out / rent amenities for the beach (wagons etc.), you kind of have to look around and ask. It turned out some of this equipment was tucked behind the waterslide. Some signage for ‘beach rentals this way’ may have been useful as well as perhaps a flier in your room. You have to cross a pretty busy street (the pacific coast highway) to get to the beach which kids can do safely only with assistance.|Notable - the Hyatt resort right next door has a prominent walkway taking you OVER the traffic.||Verdict:|- Fine for what it is but I would probably book the Hyatt instead (larger, more amenities, more restaurants, better beach support) or a VRBO further...

This is a review pertaining to the wonderful holiday buffet brunch they offered on Thanksgiving and Christmas day. We went there the first time for Thanksgiving brunch and loved it so much that went went back for Christmas day also.

The price was $135 ea. and that included tax and tip. We have been to many brunches where we have paid that much and more, with some that were not worth the money. This one was worth it.

I must say that the entire staff was very friendly and helpful whenever needed. From the time we walked in the door until we left. A big thank you to all the staff that worked on a holiday to help us enjoy our holiday brunch. It was very much appreciated.

The food offered was a feast for both the eyes and the stomach! When you first walk around, checking everything out, you feel like you want a little of everything. However, there was so much, that if you couldn't find something you liked, there must be something wrong. Delicious food from the salads to deserts with everything in between. We love brunches and believe me, we walked away happily very full. And then some.

The buffet set up for Thanksgiving was a little different than at Christmas. They had more things set up outside at Thanksgiving and because it was a bit cool and windy that day, we felt it wasn't very comfortable going outside. At Christmas, they moved much of those things inside, which we felt was better.

A large ballroom was the setup for dining tables. It was decorated very nicely and there was plenty of room. Often places try to cram in as many tables as they can and it might feel very crowded. Here there was plenty of room between tables so you could feel relaxed and comfortable.

There was someone walking around doing balloons and another doing magic for those that were interested.

There was also a young lady, at Christmas, on the stage singing and playing guitar. Our feeling about the singer wasn't a real positive one. She was just ok and we thought her song selection was a bit weak and at times thought the songs were not in the spirit of Christmas. We would have been happier with just a recorded holiday track. At Thanksgiving they had another young man singing and playing keyboard. He was much better.

Minor complaint...At Christmas, they didn't use dinner plates but instead used what we would consider more of a salad plate size. Unfortunate because even if you were to get a normal size portion of food, there would barely be enough room on the plate without putting one thing on top of the other, or possibly spilling something. Therefore, you almost had to use 2 plates to get what you would normally have on one. Otherwise you had to make 2 trips. Inconvenient. At Thanksgiving, they had regular dinner plates also but they were more off to the side and you had to look for them.

All in all, this is a holiday brunch we would certainly recommend and feel there is something for everyone to enjoy. ...

Especially for the price, this is the worst Hilton property at which I have ever stayed. The service was terrible. I waited around at two of the restaurants to try to get seated and finally gave up because no host or hostess was in sight, and the servers who were there were busy gabbing with each other, even when they saw me. I finally made my way over to a sort of snack bar, which took 20 minutes, and had the same kind of indifferent staff. Housekeeping never showed up, even after I called. The first night housekeeping told me not to worry, that they would show up on their schedule in the afternoon, but I left my room and took off the do not disturb sign when they were at the room next door and saw me leave, and they never bothered to enter or clean. At 10 PM, when they brought up some supplies after I called yet again, they didn’t remember the right ones to bring, and I had to call again. The only employees who did their jobs well were at the front desk and the bartenders, who were really nice. Usually when the service is this uniformly bad, and the workers seem indifferent to the customers, they are not happy with their jobs because of some thing management is doing. The functionality on the TV was broken, and the wireless was so slow that I couldn’t get any apps to load on it so finally just turned it off on my phone. And that was using the Hilton Honors wireless. The rooms were fine, and the balcony was nice, but the furniture was outdated, and the bathroom was tiny and outdated, more like something you would expect at a Day’s Inn (e.g., a plastic bathtub/shower and a single showerhead rather than the dual showerheads that cost $30 and are especially useful for washing off sand). The property is called beachfront, but it doesn’t have anything like the flavor of a beachfront hotel in Newport or Laguna beach, for example, where you walk out of your hotel onto the beach, with lots of local restaurants, shops, etc. around the boardwalk. it actually takes about 10-15 minutes to get to the water, including crossing over a major road. I just read several of the reviews over the last few months and wondered how the stars were being calculated because there are as many ones, twos, and threes as there are fours and fives, but it doesn’t look that way from the numerical reviews. So I went back and looked at the reviews, and as I suspected, the data are based on hundreds of old reviews, when virtually all of the guest ratings were 5/5. If they were calculated for the last three years, the average rating would be somewhere in the three star range, and the distribution of scores below it would show that about 40% of customers are now giving it a 1.2, or 3. P.S. A day later, after leaving bags I’d waste outside my door and calling for housekeeping, they came, but below is an example of what it didn’t occur to...