Hyatt Place Atlanta/Norcross/Peachtree — Hotel in Peachtree Corners

The moment I walked up to the front desk to check in I was disappointed to find that this place charges for parking: $12 per night. I find this to be a scammy, money-grubbing practice. If the Starbucks where I spend $6 doesn't charge for parking, why should a hotel where I'm spending hundreds? This is particularly irritating in a place like Atlanta, which does not have a complete public transport system. Naturally, even though they charge for parking, there are signs posted everywhere telling you they're not liable to keep your vehicle safe from break-ins.

So my first impression was "The operators of this place are not here to make my stay pleasant. They are my adversaries and they will try to extract money from me by any means necessary."

Then I was informed that I could not pay the receptionist for the parking. I would have to instead do that chore for them by scanning a QR and code sending my credit card information to some nebulous third party. The QR code on its own was a red flag: As any cybersecurity expert will tell you, scanning random QR codes you pass on the street is a great way to get your identity stolen and your bank accounts drained.

So added to my impression was "These people have no respect for the security of my personal data."

Then as I went to complete the payment, a dialog box popped up on my tiny screen telling me that they would be charging me a $1 service fee. For a service that I didn't even want while completing a task I shouldn't have had to complete. What an insult to my intelligence! This sort of degradation at the hands of people I've just paid several hundred dollars makes my blood boil, and that was before I was even able to get to my room.

Once I got to my room, I couldn't get my laptop to connect to wifi. I tried pretty persistently, messing with as many settings as I could think of, but it could never maintain a connection. I even tried it without a VPN, which I strongly discourage on a hotel network. My phone did manage to connect at first but it would keep dropping the connection and forcing me to reconnect. I ended up inadvertently using quite a bit of my limited data during my stay.

This is a critical failure for a hotel in my opinion, my local Wendy's should not have more reliable wifi than your hotel.

In other ways, it's a standard American hotel, nothing especially noteworthy about it. It has the same floor plan and amenities as a hundred other hotels in Atlanta, and the same faults: Poor ventilation, cheap mattresses, and a very loud air conditioner that I found hurt my sleep quality substantially. One room feature I did like is that there was bathroom sink and also a separate bar sink for drinking water, no need to struggle to fill a tall bottle from the bathroom sink.

The breakfast was slightly worse the average, not many choices for waffle toppings and the fruit selection was downright bad.

The pool area was slightly nicer and cleaner than average hotel.

The staff were very polite and understanding, and they attempted to help but unfortunately all the major issues here were things out of their control.

Overall, I would not recommend this hotel. I've had similar issues with the wifi in other Hilton properties so I plan to find another chain to go...

Let's start with the big one: THE FIRE. We are awoken to fire alarms at 2 or 3 am. Those continued until at least 5 am. The smell of smoke and melted rubber / engine parts started permeating the rooms swiftly after (up to and including the 6th floor) and was so strong that when we eventually evacuated ourselves (because the hotel didn't) we were asked by strangers what the smell is that was wafting from our clothes. They eventually brought in large fans and blowers but it could still be smelled days later. We were told seconhand it was the elevator that had malfunctioned, but i cant be sure of that because the management never bothered to contact or apologize to us. This incident happened the morning before the wedding we were here to attend and the bride was in hysterics because she had arranged the hotel for her guests and they had been calling her all night long to figure out if they should move hotels, if the wedding was still happening, etc. As a member of the wedding party, i personally witnessed dozens of guests asking the bride and groom about the hotel fire during their wedding without even bothering to congratulate them on their nuptials. The makeup artist told me repeatedly she could smell the burnt rubber on my clothing. The mother of the groom who was closest to the incident complained of an irritated throat from the smoke. For the fire, smoke, hours of alarms, lost sleep, stress, and days of burned rubber smells, we were offered the compensation of one half one nights stay which amounted to a discount of $55 of our $700+ stay. (Of course that was after we asked because they did not bother to come us first.) Accidents happen, maybe even fires, and that might not be able to be controlled, but how you choose to handle those situations can be controlled and Hyatt has failed miserably in making this right. In fact, the morning after the fire, we were having breakfast in the lobby placing food on our plates when one of the employees snatched the tongs directly from my hand and said i was using them on the wrong food. I don't appreciate people touching me without consent and a simple "please do not use those tongs on that food" would have sufficed instead of being treated like a toddler and having them snatched from my hands. Another employee working the breakfast apparently took out her frustration by slamming the pan of bacon so hard pieces of bacon flew out onto the counter. There are other things we were willing to overlook about our room, but not now that we know how little Hyatt cares about our experience. The light above the couch flickered constantly, the toilet ran non-stop for the first two days, the housekeeping we had scheduled never showed up, the elevator was a minimum 5 minimum wait (this was before it caught fire). Needless to say, I highly recommend you never stay at this particular establishment and reconsider giving your business to any Hyatt in the future. I know we will be avoiding them...

My stay here was quite interesting to say the least but in the end they were able to make the needed corrections to win me over.

For starters I stayed here because I had family in town who were helping me with my surgery and the additional beds/space made sense.

When filling out my reservation there are questions asked to make your stay as accommodating as possible. 1 being “would you like a room near by or away from an elevator” again being that I was having surgery I wanted to be placed near an elevator so I didn’t have to do much walking.

When I checked in, everyone was absolutely great. However, I went up to the room and it was the complete opposite of an elevator. Of course after expressing the mistake Emmanuel immediately jumped into action and got us a corrected room.

The next day, we encountered a traumatic situation where the elevator broke down while we were on it. We were stuck on the elevator for 45mins to 1hr and luckily I was with my mom but the unfortunate thing about this was the lack of communication from the night auditor who was on duty dealing with this issue. Now granted, he could’ve been in shock and unsure because it’s not everyday you get a call from the elevator that its stuck with people inside, but he had no emotion or urgency to share updates with us when we asked, multiple times might I add, what’s going on? Eventually the fire dept came and they were more open with the communication and process.

The other issues we had were non working TV and refrigerator both of which were fixed by Attlee and Ezequiel when reported.

Outside of this we were able to enjoy the stay despite the consistent run in of unfortunate events. Some of our highlights of this stay were:

Location (you’re near many shops so you don’t have to travel far for anything needed) Free breakfast every morning! It was always pretty decent food and the breakfast/morning staff were great. The pool (while updates to the area like new chairs and more frequent cleanings should be considered, the pool was a great way to relax) Pet friendly (this was both a pro and con. A pro because it’s great to see pets accepted as guest, con for the sensitive pets that bark at everyone walking by or even just bark all the time that you may here from your room) Lastly, the friendly and helpful staff. The General Manager Rayya and her staff honestly swing into action anytime something is needed. And while we had multiple unfortunate events, they never once treated us as though we were on their nerves and they handled every obstacle with a smile! For that I’ll continue to book here...