Monte Carlo by Miami Vacations — Hotel in Miami Beach

WORST TRAVEL EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE I’ve travelled a lot for business and personal throughout my life and can say that without a doubt this has been the worst place I have ever stayed at. 
I booked a room that said “ocean view” and showed a balcony facing the ocean. They also offered rooms with “ocean and city view” that were located on the side of the building. My boyfriend and I arrived early and the room wasn’t ready yet. Not a big deal but the staff seemed to be confused about my reservation. They were having trouble finding it in the system and something just seemed off. 
They said we could leave our bags with them until the room was ready. 
We arrived back at 4pm when they said the room would be ready and it was not. They said they were finishing cleaning it and we could go up in a few minutes. The door was open and the key (yes, they only gave us one key for two people) was inside. We were told staff would bring our bags up to us. Our bags had been left unattended in the lobby this entire time for anyone to take. 
As soon as we entered the room I see we are on the side of the building, not on the beach and our view is a disgusting run-down building next door. I immediately go back down to the desk thinking they made a mistake and would quickly fix it. I calmly explained we had the wrong room and am told it is the correct room. I am told that if you can see the ocean at all they consider that ocean view, even though the website shows a beach front view and also lists the view I have as something else. I was so upset. This trip is for my boyfriend’s birthday and it’s not going as planned. 
They told me they can’t do anything and I have to contact booking.com. I called and explained the situation, the woman on the phone was very empathetic and tried her best to help us. I sent her photos of our view. She said the owner was refusing to let us cancel. I asked if we could compromise and be moved to a nicer room for a discount and he refused. 
Feeling defeated I decided we will just try to make the best of it. When I got off the phone, my boyfriend said the room was filthy. I hadn’t had a chance to look yet because I only noticed the wrong view. He was right. The room wasn’t clean at all. There’s scuff marks on everything. The lamp is broken. All the furniture has stains. There’s literally BLACK MOLD around the vents! This place is absolutely gross! They clearly are not properly sanitizing for corona virus. There were marks and fingerprints on doors and sinks like nothing had been wiped down. I actually went across the street and purchased Lysol wipes to clean myself because we can’t really go anywhere else at this point because the owner is refusing to work with us. 
Also, our bags were never brought up. I had to go down and get them while the front desk just watched me and didn’t even say anything like that someone was coming or they forgot. During this time I witnessed someone being carried out on a stretcher and overheard the medics talking about an overdose. Scary. I was unsettled to think of what may come during our stay after witnessing this within 20 minutes of being here. On top of the filth, nothing works. The lamp in the bedroom is broken and several outlets do not work. The tv remote wasn’t working so we went to check the batteries just to find them corroded and leaking acid!!! The floors are slick to the point I could skate around the whole room. There are also gross stains on pillow cases and all over the furniture. My boyfriend told the desk that same night that the room was filthy and they said they would send someone to clean but they never did. Anytime I contact the desk, they all have a disgusting attitude. They couldnt even help me onto the elevator when I left our one key with my bf. Another guest had to help me. Every time I walk through the lobby someone is there having a fit about issues similar to what I have experienced. This place is super disorganized and deceitful. Animals could run this place more professionally. Will update. Pics on my review on their...

PROS: The building itself is nice. The lobby is classy, and the front desk is helpful with front-desk lobby things, like checking you in, and warning you about how much losing your wristband will cost you. The valet is an on-off kind of helpful (but really expensive at $30 a night, my car probably slept better than I did), and the view is pretty great.

CONS: The kitchen was stocked with dishes and utensils that looked like they went through a rinse cycle in the dishwasher. I was scraping crumbs off of the glasses before I hand washed them anyways with the provided (new) sponge and hotel-sized dish soap.

The pleather chairs at the glass dining room table were peeling a bit and just felt kind of gross to sit on.

Our living room TV had two black dead pixel lines running right down the middle.

In the bathroom, the caulk was peeling and the mortar between the tiles was missing in places. The floor felt kind of greasy, and turned into a bowling alley when it was wet. The bathtub floor had this absolutely gross suction cup textured material that was honestly more slippery than the bare tub floor.

The bedroom was the kicker. At bedtime, we hopped in after settling the kids into their pull-out mattress in the living room. I slept like a pig on a spit, tossing and turning the entire night. It was like sleeping on a rubberized tennis court.

I woke up in the morning wrapped in my fitted sheet next to my wife who was pretty much the same. When we realized that we were basically sleeping on the bare mattress, we promptly hopped up in horror to behold what we had been sleeping on.

Our mattress appeared to be upside-down, with the yellow rubberized material that keeps the mattress from sliding staring us in the face. That’s what we slept on, the bottom side of this mattress. We further discovered that our fitted sheet was for a Queen, not a King size, making this impossible to fix with the proper sheet.

When we decided to flip the mattress over, we observed stains of unknown origin patterning the middle of this white mattress. Given the mystery brown and red stains, we decided to keep sleeping on the bottom of the mattress, and ask for help at the front desk later that day. (We ended up using the top sheet, which was of barely sufficient size, but bigger than the fitted sheet).

When we were on our way out in the lobby, we went to the front desk. I asked the attendant to help us out with figuring out our bed situation, when he suggested that we could get new sheets at room 602 if we wanted, and he went back to chatting with the other attendant in Spanish.

This is when everything started to unravel. We were on our way out and so I decided to just handle it when we got back. Apparently there is some sheet room at 602, and I could just grab a few properly fitted sheets to put as much fabric between myself and the bottom of this mattress as possible.

We came back in, greeted by our sullen valet, and went back up to our room. It was about 7:55 PM and so I went down to this (what I assumed to be) sheet room to grab a few and make our situation somewhat tenable.

I was greeted by a printer paper sign stating that the Churchill Suites office was closed for the night, and would open at 8:00 AM the next morning. Then it hit me.

This building has several different companies operating little hotel gigs on different floors, with their own cruddy little offices. When we called the front desk, they also told us as much. The front desk gets to pass the buck onto these companies and won’t lift a finger to do anything. Your suite office closed? Screw off. Need a sheet? Screw off.

This was the most ridiculous and disjointed experience I have ever had staying anywhere. This experience made me feel helpless and infuriated at the same time, and I will never stay here again. If you’re going to stay in this building, make sure that you know exactly what company you are...

Our first stay at Mare Azur was in 2017 and we had nothing but great things to say about the hotel. So, when we were planning another trip to Miami, it was our go-to hotel to book. Our experience in 2019 was drastically different.

The biggest negative: cleanliness, or lack thereof. Our feet were (not exaggerating) black and covered in sand/crumbs/etc. within a few minutes of walking around barefoot in the room, which is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to how thoroughly our room was cleaned. We used the mop and bucket provided in the room to clean the floors, the concept of which was a first for me in terms of things I expect to do on vacation and could literally see a lighter shade of floor where we really scrubbed.

The two sleeper sofas provided in the room had cushions that are ripped apart and are frankly embarrassing to have in a hotel room, and the mechanism that operated the actual pull-out bed function of the bed was bent and made for a mattress that was sloped. To their credit, management did provide us a roll-away bed for this. We did notice a pallet of brand-new couches standing in the parking lot on the way to and from the beach; we did not think it was unreasonable to replace the couch entirely, given this. However, I won’t pretend to understand the logistics of hotel-room furniture replacement.

The walls are long overdue for a fresh coat of paint to cover up all the scuffs, marks, dirt. The dining room chairs were in a similar state to the couch: the leather material is coming apart and very-worn out. On top of this, the white leather was very visibly dirty and had to be cleaned with Clorox wipes we got at the store. Like the floors, this made the chairs a few shades lighter.

The door knobs in the room are improperly/lazily installed, with holes cutout that are too big for the knob mechanism, resulting in doors that regularly got stuck in the frame.

Further, when we went to management asking for fresh beach towels, we were told that “this is what the in-unit washer/dryer is for; clearly, we are familiar with the concept of a washer/dryer, so this suggestion came off as incredibly condescending.

If these are things that would not bother you about your room, I will say that beach access/proximity is very convenient, a grocery store (Publix) is very close by, and there are two pools and a hot tub at the hotel. However, until these folks get it together, I think that your money is much better spent elsewhere. Thanks...