Hilton Royale Palms — Hotel in North Myrtle Beach

It all comes down to a failure to communicate. I booked & paid for this about 10 mo. ago. Called late July 2019 to get the name & address of the property and confirm reservation dates. Upon checkin we were treated like we were a bother. She talked at us monotone,barking orders for ID & credit card, rattling off a speech about room & parking location & confirmed my checkout date. When asked what time the sales presentation would be for the Hilton Grand Vacations she pointed to a number on a sheet of paper. I thanked her & told her I’d call to schedule it in the next day or two. Nothing further was said. The next day I received a snarky phone call around 4pm accusing me of missing the HGV presentation scheduled for me at 2pm & I would be penalized. I told him I didn’t schedule it yet, no one told us it had been scheduled. I asked to talk to the supervisor after the guy tried arguing this fact; conveniently the supervisor & managers weren’t available. I was transferred to a girl who said she was a supervisor only after I sent an email complaining about it. She rescheduled me. I asked her for the name & address of the presentation, she gave me the wrong address. I later got an email with the correct address. I called for towels & some shampoo& conditioner. I was told to pick them up at the front desk, odd because they usually deliver to your room. Later that evening I saw a hotel staff carrying towels up to a guest’s room. I was left wondering why I didn’t get the same courtesy. The HGV presentation was a High pressure shell game with numbers in an attempt to make you feel like owning your vacation is a great investment. When we declined, another guy came & offered a cheaper option & he made us feel like we had done something wrong. Literally, we felt like we had been called to the principal’s office to be scolded for not giving him our money. The next day we were on an excursion in the ocean & got a call on my cell phone from an unrecognized number. It was the hotel calling to scold me for not checking out. The man pointed out that our personal belongings are still in the room, in a voice & tone that made it seem as if we left a lizard in the room. I informed him that our checkout isn’t scheduled until Monday. He argued with me, I told him this is what my reservation says and was confirmed by the front desk on checkin. He threatened me with my personal belongings and a $75.00 late checkout fee or the other option to pay $278 for the night, ignoring the fact that I already paid for the room, demanding I return immediately. I told him that we were in the middle of the ocean, explaining it would be unreasonable to ask the boat captain to turn the ship around for a non-emergency. When we returned to the room the room cards did not work. We called the front desk to explain our room keys didn’t work, & all we need is our personal belongings. She said we set up a late 4pm checkout. I told her that was false & nobody communicated that to us. She abruptly told me I would have to come to the front desk & speak with the manager. After waiting several minutes, I left. When I returned the manager walked away from my fiancé without acknowledging me. I asked my fiancé what was going on & he didn’t know because she left in the middle of the conversation without responding, leaving us both dumbfounded. When she returned she told us security was going up there to make sure the keys worked. I told her about all of the miscommunication, lack of communication, and snarky attitudes I encountered with each issue & she took notes, saying little, indicative of judgment/disagreement & it was uncomfortable. When I began asking 20 questions, she offered a free 2-night stay @any Hilton property and 55,000 Honors points. They failed to honor their compromise. UPDATE 2021: Hilton Grand Vacations staff continue to call my cell phone number, years later, despite repeated requests for the phone calls to stop. Often times the caller has a rude remark to make when I turn down their pitch. I don’t care if they were giving it away for free....

THE ONLY REASON I stayed at this hotel, and didn't leave to go elsewhere in the first few hours was because of how well the young security professional named Don handled my issue. He was GREAT! He gets 5 stars. My low rating is for the hotel and lackadaisical leadership. The woman at the front extension 57 and the woman at extension 3119 were not helpful, they never even informed security that there was an issue with my safe. I studied business at an AACSB accredited institution and I find it laughable that any private owner would put their name on an establishment such as this and call it anything other than 2 stars. This establishment has 0 regard for attrition of their guests, they probably make up on losing guests by charging such high prices for food drinks and everything else to enjoy yourself here.

This place is an overpriced & disgusting nightmare. Water up to my ankles in the clogged up shower. Musty smell from mildewy wetness in the lobby gives me headaches. Hilton 'timeshare preview' put us here, floor 18 as the option, you can see a drainage pipe stretched across the beach from the balcony so it's barely a view. Water leaking during rain. I checked in Tuesday, by Thursday I still had not had the room cleaned or serviced. Nobody came to give clean towels, no toilet paper, no cleaning solution in the shower where the water had backed up multiple times. As soon as you get in this room, there are instructions on the nightstand saying not to leave your valuables in the room, the instructions say if you have valuables to put them in the lock box up front at the desk. That's an inconvenience. I'm not going on vacation to have to put my valuables in the hands of people I don't know 1. They don't need to know what I have 2. I don't know them. I want MY valuables in MY room, in MY safe.I want them in the safe they have bolted to the floor in MY room. I want them in the safe that allows me to change to MY own code and combination.3. My valuables would have been too big for a lock box. I expected the in-room safe to be working and it wasn't. It should have been assessed for working order before we checked in, that's bare minimum. I called the front desk as soon as we realized it wasn't working to tell them that I wasn't able to set the code to the safe and that I didn't want to leave my valuables in my room, we had just arrived we were hungry we wanted dinner and I was told an engineer would come up to fix the safe but they never came up to fix the safe. After 2 hours, I called back for an update and my call kept getting bounced around then I was sent to voicemail by a women at concierge. I finally just called the security desk and made them aware of the issue on my own. I had to take the initiative to solve my own problem, to get a resolution that didn't take longer than a day. Don did actually get maintenance to come up to my room, but they said that they couldn't give me a new safe. They offered to change my room by that time it was already late at night and I just wanted to get on with the vacation.

In all, I spent 1k on airfare to get here for Hilton to try and sell me a 30k timeshare but they put me up in horrible Royale Palms so they didn't make a sale off of me. I've been to 2 star hotels & resorts in 3rd world countries that are better than this. $12 for a frozen margarita at Wet Whistle but the bartender serves it over ice chips because she's lazy... Way too laid back about everything including hygiene and customer service. Would...

My family and I stayed here for 3 nights. We were very excited to stay at this resort, but we were very disappointed to say the least. First of all, the customer service was terrible. We did not feel welcome at all. We were asked if this was our first time staying there, and it was, but no information was provided about the area. We didn’t even know the amenities nor activities around the resort. We had to ask valet workers where certain things were, because the resort employees did not share anything with us. When we finally got our room keys, we went straight to the room and it was the worst thing we could have imagined. It smelled like pee and cigarettes, the floors and walls were stained, the furniture and carpet looked nothing like the pictures- it was just awful. My husband and I are not the type to complain… but this whole thing was just a terrible experience. So we go down to speak to a manager and tell her that the room did not look like what we expected it to. She didn’t even let us finish talking/explain the issue (I’m sure they get this a lot) before handing out more room keys to a different room. She said maybe this one would be “more to our liking”. So we of course were very happy to have “solved” that issue that fast. We get to the second room and it’s the same, just the smell wasn’t as bad. The pictures online do NOT show what the rooms look like. The carpets are brown and the furniture looks outdated/musty. So I call down to speak to the manager to see if they have ANY rooms that actually look like what we paid over $2,000 for. She told me that the pictures online were “not advertising the furniture, only the layout”. That sounds like a scam if I’ve ever heard one. The room I booked online looked clean and more modern, not at all what we paid for. She said she could move us to a different room, but it would be the exact same just on a higher floor…. We looked around for hotels nearby but everything was booked, so we had to stay. Although the second room was not as smelly, it was still pretty dirty. The couches and carpet were heavily stained, all over. There were roaches. There were only a couple towels, no toilet paper and no hand soap. It was an awful experience. The bar was nice, and I’d say was the only good part about the resort. Customer service everywhere was lacking. Managers, all other staff, at the cafes, everywhere (there were one or two employees that actually did not look like they were miserable, though). It was just awful. Definitely the worst experience we’ve ever had at a hotel/resort. Very disappointing and I recommend that you do not spend your money on this place. Just know that the rooms being advertised online are not actually “being advertised” and it’s just the “layout of the room”. I did not get pictures of everything, but here are a couple that I did take. These are from the second “cleaner” room, I did not take pictures of the first room. I could go on and on about every detail, but it would be pages filled. No one reached out to us after at all and just pretended like...