Princess Royale Oceanfront Resort — Hotel in Ocean City

We booked a last minute trip to Ocean City during 4th of July weekend, as we had not been there before. The hotel is in a great location, right on the beach in the Northern part of Ocean City. There is a parking garage across the street that is a bit tight for larger SUVs but able to navigate and able to find parking, depending on the time of day on a higher level of the parking garage as the garage has several levels. The exterior is very nice, beach access is easy and a short walk from the back of the hotel. There is a life guard on the beach during specific hours of the day. The water is bit rough in my opinion and we advised our kids to stay close to the shore. There are outdoor showers to get the sand off when you come off the beach. If you are coming to stay at a hotel on the beach, this is a good place to stay at. The indoor pool is very nice and large and is cleaned each night. The hotel provides pool towels. The reservation desk person was very nice and worked with me to get the best rate available at the time. No beach chairs or towels or anything are provided by the hotel, expect to either bring your own stuff or to rent. The lobby appeared to be recently updated and was very nice.

As other reviews indicated, some of the rooms are old and need repairing. I called a couple of times and a newly updated room was a few hundred dollars more, so we went with the non updated suite. We booked a double queen suite with kitchenette. The room smelled like Piss at times of the day, the couch and living room chair had stains on it, the bathroom door didn't lock and the handle got stuck at times, the vent in the bathroom didn't work and the bathroom sink faucet moved. The kitchenette is useless as you really cant cook as there were 2 burners and not enough utensils and no sponges to wash dishes. The dishwasher had broken glass on the bottom of it. Overall the room felt gross and dirty. We had to call the front desk several times to get basic items. The beds were very nice though and comfortable. The room doesn't provide room cleaning on a daily basis, so expect to change out your garbage, get new towels etc., on your own.

The hotel staff was very friendly and in our opinion appeared to be untrained as they didn't know anything. At every question, someone had to ask a manager. In our opinion the hotel appeared to be a rudderless ship, lacking attention to detail. The cleaning staff also cleaned our room before we checked out and we lost a couple of personal items which is further indication of lack of hotel leadership. The basement/first floor was musty, wall paper peeling off the wall, floor needed repair. Some of the games in the arcade were broken and we were told that the hotel didn't maintain the arcade and advised to call an 800 number on the machine when the machines didn't work and credits/money were taken away from the card we purchased. I would advise to stay away from the arcade as the hotel doesn't maintain it and several games are broken.

The fitness center is small, with a couple of the typical treadmills and elliptical types of machines, no free weights and a couple of cable machines. The existing machines appeared to be very old but functioning.

The hotel doesn't offer free anything, no free coffee or breakfast or anything. Expect to pay for everything.

We had drinks from the outdoor restaurant which were ok, but not as good as they were elsewhere considering the price point. Considering the price paid for a night, we paid an average $485/ night with taxes for the room (not considering food or drink), you expect more from the hotel. For other places we stayed at that price point elsewhere, we had a far better experience. Overall, if you want a place to stay on the beach, the exterior and beach is very nice, however you are paying a pretty penny for that experience. In our opinion, some parts of the hotel needs some repairs and money put into it.

Note: This review is based on my own...

The experience we had at the Princess Royale this year was not up to the usual standards, I’m really disappointed in the lack of customer service. I’ll begin by saying, we’ve stayed in this hotel before and had a great experience, however, this year there are clearly some internal issues that hotel management needs to address. After a 7 hour drive to Ocean City, we arrived to the hotel at 5:05 PM sharp, based on a 5PM check in time. The line in the hotel lobby was very long, but I was hopeful it would move quickly since check in usually doesn’t take long and the hotel should know how many guests they are expecting. Unfortunately I was wrong, the line moved so slowly with only two employees handling check ins that it took 90 minutes. After waiting an hour and a half just to check in, we were informed that they did not have our room for us. This happened even though we called the hotel 7 days prior to our arrival to confirm that they had our reservation with the correct room, and were assured that they did, however after arrival they claimed the room was accidentally double booked. Luckily, they were able to give us another room, though it was not the type we wanted or booked and confirmed. We booked an ocean side room where we could enjoy the sunshine and the sight of the beach, we were given a ground level room that looks out into the atrium and pool. Probably a great room if you have kiddos, but since we do not, it just resulted in us not being able to open the window in our room without seeing a pool full of people looking back at us. Not wanting to allow the hotels’ mistake ruin our vacation, we decided to make the best of our week in our reassigned room. We were not informed of any change in protocols as a result of COVID-19, in fact, we stayed in this hotel in June 2020 and everything was operating like normal. However, this year we were disappointed on day 1 that no housekeeping had been by to clean our room and replace the towels, but assumed they just missed us accidentally. We called to request clean towels, but two hours later still had received no towels. Long story short, on Monday we had to either stop by the front desk or call to request clean towels four times before they were provided. This pattern continued through the week, Tuesday we requested towels twice before receiving them. By Wednesday we needed to empty the trash in our room, so we did that by ourselves and had to ask three times for fresh towels. Towards the end of the week we were just throwing our towels outside our door to be replaced along with our trash, just as many other guests were doing. The front desk informed us that they are low on housekeeping staff, so that’s why the rooms aren’t being cleaned and it’s so hard to get fresh linens. I wouldn’t have minded, if they would have been transparent, so we knew each day it would be our responsibly to secure fresh linens and empty our trash. However, it seems a bit unacceptable to not be informing guests prior to check in that there is limited housekeeping. Furthermore, something needs to be done about the number of times each item had to be requested in order to be answered. This year our room was not as clean this year as it has been in the past either. We stayed here a week and had no one in our room to vacuum, replace the linens, make the bed, or empty the trash even once. We also did politely confront the manager of the hotel about the lack of housekeeping when we saw him in the hallway disgusted by the trash and dirty towels lining the halls. At that time, we were assured that someone would be by, but they were not. This is a long winded review to say there is no sense in paying to stay here and not receive the amenities they advertise. We won’t be coming back to stay here again and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to any of my friends, this is not a hotel you...

Straight up lied to by the General Manager (I'm pretty sure her tag said General Manger, if not, assistant GM)! The company I work for paid for rooms for anyone who wished to stay overnight after our Christmas party. This is first year at the Princess Royale, but every other year, we always get a 2 bed room, as we each are able to bring a guest, and many people bring their kids as well.

I get there at 2:30pm to check in, and am told due it's not possible to get a 2 bed room because of remodeling, all of their rooms only have 1 bed. Awkward, as my guest was my ex-wife, we really didn't care to share a bed for the night. We originally were going to also bring our son, but he was unable to come last minute, so this would have been even worse. I asked was there nothing she could do? And she suggested my 6ft3in self could sleep on the pull-out sofa.

Ok, whatever. Continue to go about our evening. We get up to the room and it's clean enough, and being an efficiency if you wanted a cook-top and fridge, I suppose that's fine, but the bedroom side is very small as is the bathroom.

The bedroom would probably seemed bigger but there was this pointless large cabinet in the room, that has a single shelf in it. It seems like it would make sense to put a TV on top of it, but no, the TV is mounted to the wall half hanging over the window curtain, wired up in the most IDGAF manner I have ever seen (see picture).

There was only 1 folding suitcase stand to keep items up off the floor. Take that huge stupid cabinet out if you're not going to put a TV on it. Seems like the bed should be on the far wall, facing toward the back wall of the bathroom, with the cabinet there with the TV on top. Why is the (tiny 40"?) TV covering the window? My guess is they didn't arrange room in that way because then the headboard would be on the wall opposite the elevators and be too noisy?

We were given 4 towels, but only 2 washcloths. The next morning I go to use one of the washcloths and it had light brown marks on it. I thought perhaps the ex-wife had wiped her makeup foundation with it, no big deal, but then I find no... so what exactly did I wipe my face with??

The shower head looked like it had been put on by a toddler, with vinyl tape sloppily sticking out above. It has the lowest pressure smallest stream of water I've ever seen out of a hotel showerhead in my life. At least the water did get hot.

Another annoyance is the bathroom fan runs 24/7, at least we couldn't find any switch to turn it off. So prepare to listen to that all night if you have sensitive hearing.

Bed pillows were small. A sheet and a "comforter" which is really just a crinkly patterned thick sheet. Luckily the HVAC worked so was able to stay warm enough.

The view was of the parking garage, and the (non-blackout) curtains kept falling back open to a 5" gap in the center (had to finally take clothes hanger with clips to hold the curtain closed for privacy/sleeping in.

If I had to pay for the room, I would have been quite upset and felt very ripped off. Especially for what the room probably cost, and I can't imagine coming in the summer and paying those prices for such a small room.

The worst part was at dinner, talking with my co-workers both of whom are married, they both showed up after me and got double bed rooms. Then I find out the next day, a coworker that came by themselves at 4pm got a huge 2 bedroom room, she said if she had known she would have happily switched with us. This rooms were booked by the company in a block, to just be randomly assigned, if someone asked for 2 beds this should have been very easy to accommodate, especially in...