Emery, Autograph Collection — Hotel in Minneapolis

The good: Hotel lobby is lovely, they did a beautiful job designing a space that feels contemporary while maintaining the historical architecture of the building. They even kept the original bank vault and incorporated it into the design, an unexpected surprise while waiting in line for coffee. Spyhouse Coffee is located centrally off of the lobby, they have some of the best coffee in the metro and the staff is always kind, the food is excellent and the service is impeccable. The hotel location is in a great spot for easy access to main event venues and other downtown landmarks.

The not so good: With the exception of one lovely woman at the front desk, we found all of the staff at the hotel to be surly, rude, unhelpful and misinformed. We had encounters with four staff in total and three of them shared the qualities noted, really sets a terrible tone for the guests and prompted a conversation between us on if we would ever come back. Another note on the staff, perhaps it is a top down issue as we had an interaction with a manager who was hosting a beer tasting. After asking what brought us to the hotel (an evening away from the kids and a comedy show), he suggested that we should instead "send our kids away and stay at home" and that he thought the comedy show headline we were seeing "sucked" and that we should "heckle them the entire time". Again, setting a really terrible tone, especially when this interaction occurred in the first five minutes of our arrival. The rooms are dark, quite frankly the entire hotel is dark. But both my husband and I commented on how dark the room was, even when we had all of the lights on. The layout in the room we had, placed the television directly on one side of the bed. It was mounted on an arm that allowed you to pivot it, but ultimately the screen was only a few feet from your face. The staff at the bar had a similar attitude to the front desk staff. The treated the few patrons at the bar with indifference and despite there being only a few people, the service was incredibly slow. We ordered a simple pizza to share while having a drink and it was forgettable (at best). The bottom was blackened/burned and it was very clear that the wood oven was overdue for a cleaning. It was also covered in cornmeal, again an indication that a cleaning is in order.

There are lots of choices for upscale hotels in Minneapolis, this is a tight market and first impressions are incredibly important. Unfortunately for us, this impression...

I recently had my wedding block at the Emery.

My overall experience was ok. We had welcome bags for all of our guests and clarified multiple times that each guest should receive a bag rather than only each room receiving one bag.

They were experiencing technical issues the first day guests started to arrive which was unfortunate. After the first night, we heard from many of our friends that they only received one bag per room. I then called the front desk in the morning and clarified again that each guest should be receiving a welcome bag. Later that day I confirmed with people who had checked in that they still only received one per room.

At this point, it was too late and I was too occupied with my actual wedding to deal with this. We figured that there would be enough extra bags that we could just give the bags to the people who didn't receive them ourselves.

We only received 6 bags from the front desk that weren't distributed when we know that much more than 6 people did not receive bags. Again we were too busy with our own wedding to deal with this.

This was pretty frustrating for us because we paid to have each bag distributed to guests during check-in and feel like the front desk either gave bags to people who were not in our block or lost our bags.

Our welcome bags also contained two vouchers to Spyhouse coffee for our guests to use. This made it even more frustrating as if guests outside of our wedding block were given our welcome bags, that means we would be paying for them to eat food meanwhile the guests in our block didn't even receive them.

Some of our guests also told us they never even received a welcome bag.

If you are thinking about having your wedding block here, the rooms and lobby are nice, but please be wary of letting them issue welcome bags as their process for this seems to be very flawed. You are better off handing them out yourselves or tasking that with a close friend...

Honestly, this hotel would have been perfect if I would have had a better experience with rescheduling my stay. I travel for business often and because of the nature of my traveling I often have to stay an additional night or leave a night early, I am always changing my reservation and have historically not had a problem until staying at the Emery Autograph. My trip this time was for pleasure on a busy weekend and when I checked in I let them know I would be staying a night less than I had reserved due to some changed travel plans. They informed me that they would charge me for the last night anyway even though I let them the minute I got there to check in. Their policy is '24 hours prior to arrival regardless of time staying (or unless otherwise authorized),' which is a bit of a racket to me. I have stayed at dozens of hotels, gave reasonable notice, and never had a problem. When speaking to the manager, he basically said my night rate was going to keep the lights on in the place and I had to laugh, 'if he did it for everyone that asked they'd be out a couple thousand dollars a night,' WOW, VERY NOBLE. I think they missed the slide in the deck of customer service training where a happy customer is a returning customer. Anyhow, guess I will have to find a different place to stay for my season tickets to the Vikings! Along with my long winded issues, check in staff was not that helpful, they didn't tell us where anything was, valet is an absolute nightmare, I think they only have like 2 people working it at any given time so it's like 20 minutes minimum to get your car. There was one guy who was very pleasant, he was the bellhop and he seemed like he genuinely enjoyed helping us. Anyhow, word of caution if you have ever changing travel plans or enjoy any ounce of customer satisfaction don't stay here. If you have solid plans and are indifferent on customer service, it's a very...