Cassa Hotel — Hotel in New York

The building has Hotel Rooms and Apartments. I stayed in the Apartments for 9 weeks. Below my experience:

Pros

Many main attractions from NYC are in a walking distance, nice view from 41st floor, bed was comfortable, bathroom was clean, the apartment had kitchen and fridge, TV had plenty of channels, personnel was polite (remember: polite doesn't mean helpful).

Cons

The building is announced as recently renewed, but it's not true. It's extremely old. It was summer time and I had A/C for the first 2 weeks only and the following 4 weeks were a nightmare with no A/C. Sleeping at night was very hard. I reported the problem to the front desk guys since the very first moment. Since I reported the issue and for the following 2 weeks all they did was resetting the A/C, but that never fixed the issue. Resetting means turning it off and then on. They did that for 2 whole weeks.

Then I called the company managing the Apartment, they are called "BridgeStreet" and they are the ones that received the money for the apartment. They sent a technician to check the A/C, it was already my 3rd week with no A/C. The technician discovered that the power supply was damaged and they took one week to replace it. They were "kind enough" to bring a couple of fans during that week. But when the power supply was replaced they figured out that there was a problem with the pipelines from the building, so the A/C would still not work. It was the 4th week with no A/C. They offered me to spend the following weekend in a hotel until they came up with another solution, I accepted. When I return to the apartment I had a portable Air Conditioner. Yes, it kept the room fresh but that also meant that the room's window had to remain open to get the steam off the room.

Summary: 4 weeks to determine that there was a huge issue with the A/C that wouldn't be solved easily and that a portable A/C, although was not the perfect solution, it would save me a lot of trouble and inconvenience.

The personnel of the building were always polite but never showed a sense of urgency; which is why I don't consider them helpful. The personnel from BridgeStreet were polite as well but they turned to be helpful after I was furious with them over the phone or email. The amount of money paid for the 9 weeks stay was a lot in exchange of the poor service received. It was supposed to be a high quality service, a renewed building and a perfect stay; but everything was extremely far from that.

Even worst than all these: BridgeStreet is still renting the Apartment, offering it with A/C when actually whoever rents it will find out to have a portable A/C with an open window. Seriously? What they should do is close down the whole building until they fix ALL the wrong things from it. They are scamming and misrepresenting the customers.

Some other details: during my 9 week stay the elevators were damaged at least twice, leaving only one elevator working for a 50 stories building! The A/C in common areas such as the gym and the lobby didn't work either. In some days the hot water from the shower didn't work either.

If you are considering staying here, I would suggest you think it twice. It was my worst stay ever. You can check previous reviews here in Google, the A/C problems has been happening from months now. My experience happened from June 10th thru...

Fantastic hotel very close to Times Square. Although there's no coffee facilities in the room there is in the foyer so you can quickly go down and grab a couple of cups to bring back to your room and it tastes a lot better than the bags of instant coffee you normally find in most hotels. The breakfast tea/coffee is switched to chilled lemon water around lunch time. The air con is very good, it's easy to get the temperature down quickly to a cold level to counter the heat from NYC! It does get a bit noisy when it kicks in but you soon get used to it. Another nice touch is that the towels smell of caramel and these are changed daily.

One of the big bonuses is the fridge, which is very handy. There's a Cranberry's Cafe just across the road on the end of the next block so you can top up on supplies there and put them in the fridge to chill.

We had a deluxe king size bedroom and we found it quite big with plenty of room to wander around either side. The view was directly onto another building but given the location, you wouldn't get a decent view unless you had the top few penthouse floors!

A thing worth pointing out is that on the 10th floor there's an outside balcony; we only found out about it from another guest in the lift who was heading there, the staff hadn't mentioned it to us on our arrival. The view is directly onto the outside road but it's nice to be able to sit outside on it.

There's breakfast available in the attached Butter restaurant but we didn't use that as the prices looked quite expensive, instead we used the various deli's that are close to the hotel and seem to be open from 7am to 1am.

The hotel has just introduced a car transfer service to the airport, which costs $75 - this is only a few dollars more than what you pay a NYC taxi after you've included the rush hour fees, tolls and tips. We got a large black sedan car and the driver managed to get us to JFK airport in just over an hour in rush hour by avoiding most of the motorway and going through Queens backstreets!

On our next visit to NYC we plan to stay here again as we found it a very convenient location and of...

A great hotel right in the heart of Midtown. The place was clean and well presented. The staff were friendly and helpful and the rooms were comfortable. The room prices were reasonable and very competitive with other hotels in that area. The key draw is its location. You're never more than a 10 or 15 minute walk from some of the major sights in Midtown, whilst at the same time the hotel is situated on a quieter block. You get the best of both worlds being within easy reach of everything while not being in the thick of the chaos that is time square or around the rockerfella centre. There were a few hiccups which stopped me short of 5 stars: although the room states tea and coffee making facilities it's on request and not as standard, and on our first night when we decided to go out and experience the city the electronic lock on our room had stopped working. It turned out to just be the battery that needed replacing, and in both cases when we contact reception to report the door lock and request the coffee machine they were very quick to act and we had everything sorted within about 10 mins. The facilities staff and the engineer that were sent we also extremely helpful. The only other drawback to the room was that the cupboard space was very limited - you could only hang a few long items and then a few shirts. That normally doesn't bother me as I'm quite happy to live out of suitcases if needs be but my wife prefers to completely unpack so she struggled a bit with hanging clothes and didn't bother to unpack some of them in the end. Not a deal breaker but something to be mindful of if you're in the city on business or are planning to bring a large selection of clothes with you. When I come back to New York I will still choose the Cassa hotel as place to stay and I wed recommend it to anyone looking to experience the heart of the city, in a good location at a...