Best Western Premier Empire State Hotel — Hotel in New York

Stayed here 2 nights in sept 2023. Paid $330USD per night all in. Excellent location in the heart midtown Manhattan. Takes about 4 mins walk to get to empire state building.

Lobby was very simple, small but clean. There is free ice water in the foyer which is very very helpful as I could just fill my bottle everyday.

Check-in took way longer than normal. I paid with gift cards and for some reason it took the lady at the desk about 20 mins to process it. She also didn't recognize that I was a BW Platinum member and I had to request my free water, etc. She also said I would get 500 BW points for staying which has not happened.

No free breakfast which I was aware of but it would have been nice if that is provided. There is a nice eating area/ cafe at the back of the hotel but you need to pay.

Rooms are very small. I was on the 18th floor. There's about a foot of space between the bed and the wall. Very little walking space of space to store luggage in the room. The pics of the website are accurate to what the room looked like.

Sheets were clean, big was huge...I think it was a cali-king. A bit soft for me but after a full day of walking, I fell asleep fine. Pillows are oddly small for a bed this size. They are standard pillows and not king size pillows.

Room AC was good. Wifi connection was consistent. Cleanliness of the room could be improved. There was a large stain on the curtain, mold in the glass shower caulking and marks on the wall. The LED lights strip under the bathroom mirror also had this weird tint to it and was falling off.

Oddly,.there is no minifridge but there is an iron and ironing board. A fridge was brought up on request and they removed a small table in order to fit the fridge on the floor. A safe is available in the drawer of the storage/dresser unit.

On second day, we came back to our room but our bed was not made which I found strange. Normally if you stay over one night, the bed is made. All housekeeping did was empty trash and provide new towels. I found that rather strange and I was told that making the bed is now on request only....no one told us that.

Overall, it was a decent stay but there are definitely many other...

We had a group of 35 stay at this hotel from May 15 to May 20. We have booked groups many times before and the many hotel brands have always been great and accommodating. Our experience here was awful. We were visiting with a group of 27 students and 8 chaperones from Ontario, Canada. The students were great but the service was terrible. There was a mix up in our booking and we arrived at 2 in the morning with no rooms until the next day. We worked around this and found hotels. BW charged us for the night of the 20th even though we explained the mix up and asked them to resell the rooms. They would not even consider this. We had three extra rooms that we didn't need the entire stay. They charged us for them and then asked to use them the last two nights. Supposedly the hotel was fully booked so we felt they could easily have resold the rooms. We tried to pre order breakfast but they said they couldn't because it was too big of a crowd. I guess they didn't want our service. We asked for a wake up call and was told there were too many to call all of them so not sure if they could do it. One of our chaperones had to stay at a different hotel and needed to be at the BW yo check on students often. He was treated poorly and asked why he was there even though he was the person who booked the rooms.

For a major chain hotel, who you would think would cater to groups, especially out of country groups, this hotel fell far short! I think profit is their main concern at any cost and customer service is not the priority. I have stayed at many Best Westerns before in the US and Canada and this was by far the worst experience of them all. Do better Empire BW NYC. We spent a lot of money at your establishment. Not a good look for your...

*Updating my review on December 12, 2023. Thank you to the manager Jay for reaching out directly and taking the time to walk through the problem we experienced and why much couldn't be done. It would've been helpful to have the insight up front instead of the responses we received which just frustrated us. We did reach a solution if/when we book his hotel again which is very likely since our stay was pleasant. Thank you for taking the time, Jay!

I really wanted to give this a 5-star rating but ran into an issue that failed to get resolved and unfortunately, customer service is extremely important to me. Over 24 hours prior to arrival, I noticed on Best Western’s website that the room rate was $200 cheaper per night than when we booked. I called the hotel first in which they replied they could not do anything so I decided to call customer care at corporate in which they had me file a claim form and told me someone would be in contact with me. Fast forward not even 24 hours and they told me that they don’t honor lower rates from THEIR OWN website and because it was less than 48 hours from check in, they couldn’t do anything but I could ask the hotel manager since they are responsible for raising/lowering the rates at their specific location. Funny enough the manager was never present at our hotel to speak to and they were not willing to work with us at all. Aside from that, the hotel was very clean and the room was spacious for NYC. It was a little loud at night but that is expected for a city. The location was within walking distance to just about everything in mid-Manhattan and public transit was easily available. They were kind enough to hold our luggage for a very responsible/small fee ($1 per bag) until we were departing the city so that...