M Social Hotel New York Times Square — Hotel in New York

NYC city break in January/February 2025

In a nutshell - this hotel is modern, luxe-feeling in the communal areas (lobby and bar), in a great location & offers a decent sized room for the money (I was one adult with a 5 month old baby) but I wouldn’t book it again and here’s why:

The bathroom lacked basic amenities like a heated towel rail and didn’t have flannels or hand wash - there was a bar of soap by the sink. This made it tricky washing and drying baby items and dirty clothing and we didn’t have a bath (see below).

The minibar fridge is too small to store anything worthwhile - you can just about get away with some bottles of water, a bottle of milk and some snacks but not meal leftovers and you couldn’t store decent amounts of baby food or formula/milk.

There aren’t any cups or a kettle provided in the room for basic hot drink facilities - if I was using formula for my baby I’d have to either bring my own kettle or request it for the room.

I booked the double double premier room and requested a travel cot. I was told for fire safety reasons I had to have a king instead to accommodate the cot even though I’d paid to upgrade. This meant that my room didn’t have a bath, just a shower. For washing my 5 month old baby I had to walk to my mum’s room to use her bath. Seems contradictory to be forced to take a different room to accommodate a baby and then that option not offer a bath to wash the baby in.

Before our arrival we requested adjoining rooms. When we arrived in the early hours of Thursday morning, we were told by the reception staff that this could be accommodated. It wasn’t until we got to the lifts/elevators that we realised I had been placed on the 32nd floor and my mum and sister on the 25th. Due to the lateness in the day, we decided to just go to our rooms and sort in the morning.

I was in a room alone with my baby and began to unpack so we could go to bed. I then received a call saying we could move to the same floor but it wouldn’t be adjoining and so I said I didn’t want to move. A few minutes later another member of staff rang to clarify that they had an adjoining room to my mum and sister down on the 25th. Despite being really tired and it being so late I packed up the room and move downstairs with my baby and our luggage.

As it was so late, we went to bed and thought nothing of it until the morning when my sister knocked on the adjoining room and discovered we were next door to each other but in fact not adjoining. So basically my move in the early hours of the morning was for nothing.

The room had a thermostat panel on the wall and from a quick look it seemed that the temperature could be adjusted per room. However it was not possible. I requested the technician to come up and was told there was only one setting, auto, and it was fixed to 65 degrees. However, the internal temperature reached 80 degrees and never went below 75. This was far too hot for me and my baby - even in January - I had to have the windows and curtains open most days to try to reduce the temperature. It was loud from the street noise and very bright from the illumination of Times Square.

The location is perfect for accessing everything in and around Times Square, there are some great local cafes and restaurants for popping out for coffee and breakfast and Whole Foods is less than 10 mins walk away.

*The view from our room was exactly as expected and was great to see the bright lights and hum of the city at all hours of the day in Times Square.

*Concierge is a bit basic in terms of what they offer and how helpful they are so if that side of the hotel amenities is important to you, I’d recommend booking somewhere else.

You can also arrange to have packages delivered to the hotel for a small fee - great if you want to shop online ahead of arrival.

The fee is $2 for receiving packages, $2 per package per day. They hold packages up to 5 business days prior to arrival. To retrieve, simply ask for the package upon check-in and have it delivered to: 226 West 52nd Street, New...

I've never had a worse hotel experience in my life. We waited in the hotel lobby 30 minutes for our room to be ready. It was a nice lobby, we had ice cream with the kids. At 4pm, we went into the room, and my wife immediately ironed all of our clothes for Broadway as we got ourselves ready, and we left around 5pm. We came back around 10:30pm, and there was a letter under our door accusing us of smoking right after check-in.

We don't smoke. We don't vape. Full stop, we just don't. We don't own any vape-like devices. We don't smoke weed. We don't even drink. Our children are in elementary school, and also definitely don't smoke or own any vapes. None of us left each other's sight. No one broke into the room and secretly vaped while we got ready. The accusatory letter also informed us that they had already charged us $500 dollars for smoking or vaping, which we absolutely 100% did not do.

Misunderstandings happen, so we went down immediately to dispute the charge. Long story short, no matter how much we attempted to reason with them, they refused to budge. The most incredibly frustrating part of the entire experience is that all of the staff, all the way up to the director I talked to the next morning, express a mindless, glazed-over, almost cult-like belief that it's simply impossible for their magic AI smoke detector to ever be wrong. I have no idea whether this is just an act they are using as an excuse to actively scam people, or if it's that they're incapable of independent thought and/or don't care at all about their customers or reputation. Either way, the end result is the same: We were falsely accused of something we didn't do.

After every question I asked, I got a bumbling, stammering response about how the sensor measures particles. The accusation itself is completely nonsensical. The narrative of the faulty smoke detector is that we sat around waiting to go into the room, got up there, vaped for 40 minutes, left the room, and then.... quit smoking? Because the door system and cameras will clearly show that after coming back from the show, we never left the hotel all night. I asked about that. More eye-darting references to the particles. Could we go up into the room and test their iron, a device that also, you know, vaporizes? Nope. While looking at the floor nervously, he claimed he had tested an iron once and it didn't set it off. Guess that settles it!

They didn't care. All hail the magical smoke detector. The final resolution that was suggested to me was to dispute the charge with my credit card. I will do that, but I don't really even care about the money anymore. No amount of money can ever make up for baselessly being called a liar. I'm going to start reaching out to the countless other reviewers online who I've since discovered have had this same experience. Although the hotel management seems content to copy/paste the same statement over and over on every single one of these reviews about the infallibility of the holy smoke detector, I'm guessing many of those poor souls are also telling the truth, and have been scammed by M Social. It probably adds up to a lot of money over time, and it seems like something a class action lawyer would be interested in, as well as the NY attorney general.

Please don't stay at this hotel, they do not care about their customers. Don't just take my word for it, I encourage you to read through all of the 1-star reviews online. We are good customers, we didn't smoke in our room, and my wife and I did not deserve the horrible treatment we...

My sister and I booked a room at M Social Hotel New York through Airbnb and stayed there from Dec. 17-19. On the night of the 18th, after being out all day, we returned to our room around 6:30 PM and ordered room service for dinner. We had gotten caught in the pouring rain on the way home, so my sister was using the blow dryer to dry her hair and clothes while we waited for our pizza to be delivered. Sometime before 7 PM the room service attendant came to deliver our dinner. While we were eating our food (pizza literally in hand), we received a phone call from the telephone in our room. When I went to answer, I was greeted by a hotel employee who accused us of vaping or smoking in the room, saying that a sensor had gone off and alerted them of there being vape or smoke-like substances in the air. She said that a $500 charge was automatically added to our card because of it. I was immediately confused and began asking questions, to which she replied that they use a third party company for sensors that will detect if someone vapes or smokes in a room. I explained to her that my sister and I do not smoke and that we do not have anything on us that could’ve caused these “substances” to be in the air. I also explained to her that we were in the middle of eating dinner but she insisted that this detector was accurate and said we could even go down to the lobby to view the “report”. I told her that “we would like to finish our dinner first and then we would love to come down and take a look at it.” When we went down to the lobby, a front desk associate went to the back and got the lady who called us. She handed us a piece of paper of a line graph with a single, perfectly straight line (which looks exactly the same as every other graph I’ve seen posted in these reviews). Based off the graph, she said, vaping or smoking was detected between 7:10 AM - 7:50 PM. I asked her how this sensor works as it could not possibly make sense that there was smoking detected while we were in the middle of eating dinner. She said there was nothing she could do about the charge. The reasoning she used to defend her claim was, “people will tell us they don’t vape or smoke, but then when we go clean their rooms, we sometimes might find evidence of smoking products”. I find it somewhat insane that she started resorting to hypotheticals to back up the accusation. I asked her if she was aware that the google reviews for this hotel are flooded with people sharing very similar experiences of being falsely accused of smoking in their room and being charged $500 for it. She said she was aware, so I asked her “If you’re aware of this, why do you guys keep doing this to your guests?” I also explained that a lot of the reviews mention that people were using the blow dryer shortly before they were called and accused of smoking. She continued to rely on this third-party company’s report and said that the only way to remove the charge would be to dispute it with our credit card company. Be aware that the hotel does not care at all about addressing these concerns and their only solution is to copy and paste the same response under every review that brings this up. The graph that the employee handed us says that the third-party company is called Rest. Yet, aside from the Rest company website, there’s absolutely no information anywhere online regarding...