Casa Marina Key West, Curio Collection by Hilton — Hotel in Key West

This is a long read. If you are considering spending money on Casa Marina, it is probably worth your time.. ||||I am a 49 year old Dutchman with a decent job. I deal with all kinds of different people on a daily basis and am used to quickly adapting to situations and types of people. On my day of arrival, we are received at check-in by a lady who is clearly not cut out for this job. She checks us in in a very gruff manner. When I walk away with my travel partner after 5 minutes, we look at each other in amazement. We have never experienced this before. So unwelcoming and cold. It feels like we had to apologize for bothering her with our check-in.|||| Months in advance I reserved a king suite with sea/pool view for 3 nights (at $1400 per night). The grumpy lady at check-in turns out to have given me a key for a suite with a Keywest view. Apart from the fact that that is not what I booked months in advance, that is a suite that is about $1500 cheaper for 3 days. She sends me there without mentioning it. Very questionable and reprehensible. I walk back to the lobby to ask for the key to the right room. It turns out that the suite with sea/pool view, which I booked months earlier on the Casa Marina site (not with an intermediary), is no longer available. I get all kinds of explanations as to why that is the case. "There has been a renovation so the system did not know which rooms would now be available." "They cannot see in the lobby in the system what type of room has been booked." I do not get it. Couldn't they have checked this in advance and contacted me? If they know that their reservation system makes mistakes, it might be worth checking it manually. With a room costing $1400 per night, that is worth it. No, that really wasn't possible. It was actually very annoying for the grumpy lady herself.||||I just had to understand the situation. Of course I didn't. I thought they should understand my situation. The grumpy lady walked into an office and came out with the message that the manager allowed her to give me a discount on my room. The manager didn't think it was worth coming out himself. I explained to her that if I was looking for a discount, I would have booked another hotel that was cheaper. At my request, the manager comes along. I attach great importance to the sea view and the atmosphere that it brings. The lady is now tired of the discussion and starts threatening that it is either the inferior room or that I can look for another hotel. It's amazing how you can go from a wonderful holiday atmosphere to a crazy stressful situation in just 10 minutes at Casa Marina. I reluctantly accept the inferior room, which later turns out to be very noisy. My neighbor had a bad coughing fit. The manager goes back to his office.|||| I'm still standing with the check-in lady and I don't fully understand what they mean by the discount. My suspicion turns out to be correct. It's not about a discount, they make me pay the regular price of the other room. There is no form of compensation. Not even a voucher for a free coke. When I ask further questions, the lady becomes angry. She suddenly says 'don't approach me' and repeats that a few times. I'm perplexed. 'I'll call security'. And so in just fifteen minutes you go from a sunny holiday that you have been looking forward to for months to an icy situation where security is sent after you. But, fine madam, let the security come, I only spoke in a calm tone, so the security guard can also see that. The manager also comes out of his box again. He did take the 'stay calm' course with disappointed customers. But substantively he has nothing to offer at all. Casa Marina has no policy for when they make huge mistakes in the reservation process. When I walk away for the last time and look back, the grumpy lady looks at me with a look I have rarely seen. 'If looks could kill'... it spontaneously makes me laugh. It's an insane situation. ||||Anyway, with a lot of stress and a horrible start to what should have been 3 relaxing days, I sit in a dark room with a small balcony overlooking a tennis court blocked by a tree. I did see online that there were still upgrades available with sea view which remained empty all days of my stay. ||||The problem with such a negative experience at the beginning of your stay is that you will notice a lot more that is not good. Here it comes:||||- When I arrived at my expensive room there were two empty drinking glasses in front of my door. Despite a request to remove them, they were there for two full nights. On the first day, others added extra room service waste, which was also there for a whole day and two nights. ||||- The decor of the room, which has just been 'renovated', looks very cheap. An attempt has clearly been made here to achieve the chicest possible appearance with as little money as possible. Printed canvases hang on the wall (how much does a real painting cost??). The 'marble' in the shower is ceramic, finished with real marble edges. The styling with all different separate cabinets and furniture has the appearance of an Ikea showroom. It's not terribly bad, but it does radiate laziness, poverty and ultimately contempt for your high-paying customer.||||- The first impression of the room: A front door with the paint peeling and a heavily damaged door frame, probably caused by the cleaning cart that has been driven and sanded against it endlessly. Before you get to the suite building near your room, you pass banisters and damaged elevator doors (of the extremely old and slow elevator) that look like you've ended up in a cheap motel.||||- There is a reason that there are no photos of the fitness room on the Casa Marina site. The room looks very unkempt, old and poorly maintained. This is far below the level of what Casa Marina pretends to be. Machines are incomplete, making them virtually unusable. The towels are one square foot in size (lol.. really!) and therefore not usable, the used towels are in a basket that is so full that towels have now fallen next to them, large chunks of paint are curling from the ceiling near the air conditioning, towel hooks come loose from the wall and the room itself looks very poor. Oh, and there is no changing room and no toilet in or near the fitness room. This is pure contempt for your customers. ||||- When I walk back from the gym to the main entrance (you have to leave the building to get to the gym), two doorboys are talking to each other. I greet them as they pass. They don't bother to say anything back and continue talking to each other.||||- The minibar in the room is empty. For rooms from $600, and certainly for a room of $1400, that is pure poverty. Undoubtedly this is all too much trouble for management. Don't expect a small welcome gesture in your room either, a little chocolate, a bowl of fresh fruit, a newspaper in the morning. It's not there. ||||-The hotel has a beautiful courtyard towards the beach. What stands out there are the enormous areas of artificial grass. Here too, Casa Marina has opted for the cheapest and easiest solution.||||- The breakfast buffet is very basic. Too basic for the price asked for it. The young man frying the eggs has a huge attitude. He looks like he would rather hang out on the street with his friends and that he actually feels too good for this job. He also clearly hasn't fried many eggs in his life. The friendly waitress answered my question positively if there was fresh OJ, but later came over with OJ from a pack. The waffles under a warming lamp are far from fresh. I suspect they are not even made locally, but come from the wholesaler. They are dry and hard. There are also hard-boiled eggs on the buffet. For some vague reason, they've all already been peeled. It looks dirty and unsanitary. The dining area inside is very simple and only half furnished. We eat breakfast outside on the terrace, where it is more atmospheric. Seating is until 11am. However, at 11.15 they start tearing down the terrace around us and carrying tables. great!||||- The beds on the beach are also very poorly organized. You are not supposed to take a bed somewhere or take something that is already on the beach. You have to report to the pool boy and he will install you. After waiting ten minutes, while it is not really busy, the man has time for us. The pool boy turns out to be an over-age unkempt surfer who comes across as if he has just smoked two joints. When we ask for two beds, he looks around and says that there are no more, 'just go and look at the other beach'. We have no idea what he means by that. We only see 1 beach. He says 'yeah man, there's another beach' and walks away.' For the umpteenth time we are left in amazement. We then walked onto the beach ourselves and found two abandoned beds in a remote corner. A waiter who saw that things were not going quite as they should helped us with the umbrella. ||||Conclusion: The staff at Casa Marina is, with an exception here and there, far below standard. Many people really don't know what they are doing, let alone what it is to provide service and radiate hospitality. The site is highly praised for its recent renovation. Don't expect too much from it, though. The lobby in particular is very beautiful, but after that everything quickly deteriorates and it has the appearance of an average beach pavilion. The level of service and finishing does not match the prices asked for the rooms. As I read (afterwards) in other reviews, this problem lies with upper management. They clearly do not know what it takes to run a hotel at a high level. This inability radiates to the people on the floor. Casa Marina is a bit like that girl in your class who knew she was very beautiful and therefore developed a very bad character. Prepare to be...

The resort is gorgeous, and the lobby is very inviting. It smells amazing as soon as you walk in the hotel, which is saying something because the brown seaweed everywhere in the Florida Keys smells like rotten eggs. The hotel has awesome views because it is right on the beach. When we booked the room online we signed up for an upgrade, if one was available. However, when we got there WE had to ask for the upgrade, and they said that the upgrade we wanted was unavailable, but a room that was lesser quality than what we wanted was avaialble for triple the price. We then had to haggle with the girl for a better room we after driving for 13 hours, which was an additional $300 a night. The staff was friendly, but I only encountered one person that was genuinely nice. The woman who set up our golf cart rental and jet ski tour was very genuine in her guest interactions. I felt like everyone else was nice, but they expected to be tipped with every interaction. We wanted room service our first night after driving around 13 hours that day. It would not recognize us in the system, and my husband walked back up to the front desk to ask for help. The only thing she did was spell his name out on a post it and said enter it as it appears, but you have to enter your initials in the system. It would never accept what we entered, so we just decided to go get some food in the restaurant, which is EXTREMELY overpriced for the quality and service provided. I did not eat anything else at the resort restaurant. The room was clean, but the "kitchette" area was very disappointing. We were staying in a suite with a patio, and it had a small drink fridge without a freezer, no microwave, and no extra sink. There were only two VERY small trashcans in the room with NO bags, which I thought it very odd. I could only imagine that people traveling with children have several inconveniences when staying at the resort, which is supposed to be family friendly because they have a pool dedicated to family swimming. I think it is really strange that you wouldn't have modern conveniences that you have at other hotels. We would have loved to be able to get some ice cream, if we only had a place to put it. For the price you pay here, it should include every convenience possible. I know you are trying to force people to eat in your overpriced restaurant. The cafe/bar area does have really good coffee and drinks, but the muffins and pastries are Starbucks quality. The banana nut muffin tasted like it was at least two days old. The pool staff was friendly and helpful, and the adult only pool was extremely clean. The walls are Very thin. The last two nights of our stay it sound like there was an elephant above us keeping track of it's steps for the day. The housekeepers showed up to our room on the 2nd night of our stay around 4:45 when we were getting ready for dinner, which I felt was a really late time to show up. They came back around 7:00 at night to clean because my husband requested it. I went to the shop on two different occasions to look for a hair tie and nail clippers. They do not have simple rubber bands to tie your hair back. They only carry the phone cord bands and hair clips. Why wouldn't you carry hairbands or scrunchies when you have a pool and beach area, women need something to pull their hair back that isn't going to get tangled in their hair like those horrid phone cord bands. When we were leaving I broke my thumb nail and needed clippers which they also did not have in the shop. The women working in there both times were very unapologetic and not empathetic at all that they did not have what was needed. Again, for the price you pay here, there should be way more conveniences than are provided. The next time we come to Key West, we are going to stay somewhere else. It is very gorgeous, but there is definitely room for...

I’m sharing my true experience with you, this is a one time and last time in this hotel. We booked a Suite at this location as its well known hotel franchise. Once arrived, they check us in, give us the room number. As we are getting closure to the area we started hearing digging noises and once arrived to the room we actually got surprised with orange cones and yellow strip. The hallway was in a big mess with dust and stains from paint. At first, we thought it was a prank, we went back to the reception and to my surprise they acted not knowing what I was talking about. I asked the front desk to escort me to the room as I think there was a misunderstanding… Arrived to the room, she simply with no shame removed the cone put it a side and open the room door and said “Yes, this is your room!” With a background noise of workers digging next to the room. We told the person that this was never disclosed to us, at booking neither at checking, the person said “I will check with my supervisor and see what we can do as this itempura last minute renovation situation” (we looked online in there website and it stated renovation were completed Spring 2024) We had to wait in a hallway with our bags for couples of minutes as she also took the room keys with her. Find out they were actually calling us, but with the noise around us we couldn’t even hear the phone. She give us two options: Wait 4 hours for a similar room in second floor in the same noisy area. Accept the room and get a resort credit that will be use in the permises. We asked the lady at what time the working will end and if tomorrow morning there will be any working as we are expecting to have a restful night and a peaceful morning. The Supervisor assured us that the work will stop around 5 Pm and she contacted the manager who confirmed that no work will be scheduled for the next day as it’s a Sunday. As we were in the middle of August and hallway are open with no AC and there’s a storm out we decided to go with accepting the room. Once, unpacked, we decided to go to the beach, we ordered some drinks then we went to “Dorada” (the hotel restaurant) for lunch, we ordered food and drinks, we received the food, and as we were waiting for the drinks 30 minutes we started eating without anything to drink. No one came to check on us and no one around to talk to. Once we finished we went to the front of the restaurant asking for the check. The host didn’t have any idea about out tab, stating that the waitress was called inside and is not there now, we have to repeat the order for her to be able to pay our tab.

Going back to the room, we tried to take a shower, surprise!! No body wash, and two completely empty bottles of shampoo and conditioner… this is a first.

We had a sofa bed that we asked them earlier to make, they actually made the bed but didn’t left any covers !!

After a bad day feeling scammed in this location we went to bed hopping at least we will be rested for the next day.

9:06 Am…. Digging noises vibrates the room… we were so confused about it, we contacted the front desk again they apologized, stated they will give us another 50$ credits, we explained to the lady that credits will not make up for all the messy weekend we are having. We checked out on time and went to get out Invoice and find out they didn’t apply the morning credit, when we asked the lady about it she said “you never agreed on it”. We told her to never mind as the whole point is about such a big hotel company cannot even feel your frustration and doesn’t even recognize that this is not expected from such an expensive hotel.

We left very upset and we decided to put our experience out first to be heard as we weren’t heard at this place, second to gobe a feedback to any visitor considering hotels in keywest.

For Hotel staff this was room #1013, Stay...