Hotel La Jolla, Curio Collection by Hilton — Hotel in San Diego

Save yourself the agony of staying here and book somewhere else or cancel your reservation immediately if you’ve already made the mistake of booking this hotel, like I did.

To start, I booked this hotel because of the location and amenities. It is walkable to the beach and looks great on a map. Little did we realize that it’s at the corner of two very busy intersections (with our room being the closest to both in the corner). Don’t get me started on the amount of noise in the rooms secondary to this… if you plan on sleeping, you’re probably better off bringing a tent and camping a few blocks away on the sidewalk, that definitely would be more peaceful.

We booked a deluxe king room. We are Hilton gold members (which I’ll discuss more shortly), so although these rooms do not guarantee an ocean view, we were hoping for an upgrade so that we would have views of the sunset. When checking in we asked about an upgrade, which was not available. We also asked about a higher floor (as we were on the 3rd)… also unavailable. Being the positive people that we are, we accepted the fact that we couldn’t change our room and we dropped our stuff off and then headed up to the restaurant to catch the view. The hotel advertises that their restaurant is on the top floor, so we figured if we didn’t get the upgrade we would be able to head to the top for a drink and still catch the view. Upon arriving to the top floor, what did we learn? The restaurant was CLOSED.

We called Hilton customer care who called the hotel to express our dissatisfaction. To our surprise, it seems that a new room was built and added on to the hotel because an hour after checking in, an oceanfront room upgrade on the 8th floor suddenly became available. At this point we took the room but it was way too late since the sun had already set.

Since we were not able to use our food and beverage credit at the bar ($30/day for being Hilton Gold), we decided that we would use it on breakfast the next morning. We woke up and headed downstairs only to find that “there was no breakfast that day due to unforeseen circumstances.” When checking out, we asked if they were able to credit us the $30 to our reservation since we could not use the food/dining credit and we were told “it has to be used on food and dining, but since there weren’t any opportunities to do that they will credit us the amount in points.” This isn’t the same but we took it and left.

The rooms are so outdated and dirty. There are chips in the tiles, chips in the paint, dust on the yellowing lights, hair from someone else in the shower, black mold in the grout of the shower floor and walls, and more.

In conclusion, for the rate that you pay for this room, it’s not worth it at all. There are hardly amenities and the ones that are advertised aren’t even open. I would have had a better experience at a Howard Johnson. If you enjoy sleeping in dirt, not having access to food or drinks on-site, unhelpful staff, the sound of fast moving traffic, outdated rooms, or overpaying for things, then this is the hotel for you! If you aren’t into all that, you should definitely look elsewhere.

Sadly, we ended up canceling the second night we had here and booked a different hotel down the road that is much nicer and fairly...

My family and I decided to take a staycation trip out to SD so we booked Hotel La Jolla considering it was minutes away from the popular La Jolla Shores Beach. We checked in Friday afternoon and grabbed some late lunch/happy hour at their top floor restaurant, Cusp. The food was good and views were beautiful!

The one star is mainly for the rest of the stay. At around 10pm Friday night, the power went out and it was pitch black. We figured it would take a couple minutes to turn back on, but an hour- 2 hours went by, and it was still out. I tried calling the front desk a couple times, but it was a busy signal. I tried contacting Hilton guest services, but it was already during non business hours. We learned from our neighbors this was a scheduled outage. We had our 7 month old baby asleep when it occurred and we weren’t about to pack everything in the dark and try to find a new hotel in the middle of the night. Luckily, this was by the beach so we didn’t need the AC however, the temperature was still uncomfortable. We couldn’t leave the patio door open if we wanted because our room was next to the busy Torrey pines St. (which was actually pretty noisy- tip: avoid getting a lower level room and not facing Torrey pines and the pool). We heard other guests leaving since our room was also right next to the emergency stairs and heard their footsteps all night. We couldn’t turn on my daughter’s white noise to drown out the sound or charge our phones (so we had to limit using our phone light to save our battery). We ended up staying the night since it was more of a hassle to leave and just hoped it would be back on in the morning. My daughter woke up at 330 am to feed and it was still pitch black.

When we woke up around 7am, the power was still out. I was hoping to hear an apology or notice of what was going on from management, but we didn’t hear anything so my husband went downstairs to get some information. They said “their last update to have it turned back on was 8:30am.” We were suppose to stay for 2 nights but we decided to check out and leave. By the time we left, it was 1030am and the power was still out. Our morning/day plans were delayed and ruined dealing with this mess. It was more upsetting to hear that the Starbucks across the street were aware of this scheduled power outage weeks prior from SDGE.

Overall, it was very disappointing. It was definitely not how I imagined our first mini vacation with our little one would be like. Hilton guest assistance were notified and informed me my case would be reviewed by the GM. I don’t think it’s fair that we’re charged for the stay since there was no power 90% of our stay and for the inconvenience/hassle we went through especially with our baby.

Update: They refused to refund the stay and for the inconvenience, Guest Assistance would only credit me a FRACTION of my points- not even the full amount. So much for the appreciation of being a “Loyalty...

We stayed at this hotel in December 2018. For the nightly rate, two stars really is generous. If not located in La Jolla, and with some of the rooms having a nice view, this is a 1-star hotel. Examples of the problems:

1. No self-parking, and they extort $37 to valet park. $37. Valet service is unreliable (sometimes completely absent). $37 is absurd. All they do is slow you down by making you get out, and then they drive your car 15 or 20 feet over to the parking lot that's right in front of the hotel. It's a useless 'service' designed to generate revenue for the hotel. And again, $37. (search the other reviews and you will see quite a few where the guests report having money or items stolen from their vehicles by the valet staff)

2. Front desk staff, at best, impersonal. At worst, outright rude. You say "hello, how are you doing?" and they say "what do you want?"

3. 'Cusp' restaurant: pretty good food, absolutely STUNNING views, but really sketchy service. To make every table a view table, the restaurant is long and skinny. If you're seated in the half of the room furthest from the kitchen and bar, you're not going to see your waitperson very often. Service attitude: indifferent. They don't want to be there, and they don't really care that you are.

4. This problem only applies in the winter months, but the 'hallways' are absolutely freezing. The hotel only has one side (the view side), so across the hall from the rooms is an open space, and there is a serious draft issue. You'll freeze getting from the elevator to your room, and vice versa.

5. Street noise: for our room, and apparently about half the rooms, you're going to have some serious street noise. The hotel knows this, so there are 'sound machines' in each room to mask the exterior sounds. Not a complete solution, and definitely not a solution if you want to sleep in a quiet environment.

6. Decor: about 90 percent looks like it's from the 1970's - not a recent attempt at retro decor, but more like they haven't updated since the actual 1970's. The other 10 percent looks really modern, and the collision between the two just doesn't work. It screams: we have location and view, so we don't need to make the place look good.

Positives:

1. The view (available only on the higher floors).
2. Pretty good food in restaurant 'Cusp' (but sketchy service)
3. The location- close to most of what you want to do in La Jolla

Bottom line: The positives just aren't enough to offset the serious negatives. Find somewhere...