La Terraza De San Juan — Hotel in San Juan

Perfect experience at La Terraza. I'm typically a traveler who likes to be near cultural centers, but still wants to stay in a chain hotel; I usually like the perceived comfort that comes along with recognizing the brand name. For this stay I decided I wanted to be right in the heart of Old San Juan and stay in one of the smaller hotels.

I was traveling with three friends and only stayed one night since we were getting on a cruise the next day. We arrived late in the evening, but they were expecting us. As we walked in, they offered us a "welcome beer" which was much needed after the day spent traveling. They told us we were VIPs and they truly treated us as such. They showed us to our room (#321) which was a suite. The room had a huge bed, the most comfortable pull-out couch I've ever felt in my life, a huge open shower (open to the bathroom, but still private and separate from the room) with a rain shower head, and three small balconies overlooking the city streets. Everything was spotless and comfortable. The room stayed cool even with the Caribbean heat outside.

On the rooftop, the view was amazing. It had a small infinity pool and overlooked Old San Juan and the cruise ships in port. Also on the rooftop were a great open-air bar and an area to relax. The front desk also functioned as a bar, but the best bar of the hotel was only a room or two away. This bar made some of the fanciest, best drinks we had ever had. The bartenders were true mixologists and made some concoctions with seven or more ingredients.

We headed to a cool little restaurant/bar (La Factoria) just down the street for dinner and back to the room for bed. The next morning we went downstairs for breakfast. The waitress was also our bartender the previous night and she served us some great gourmet breakfast food. The food presentation was beautiful!

Later that morning, we left for the cruise. It is absolutely walkable to get to the cruise port, but a few in the group weren't too excited about dragging their luggage over uneven sidewalks. The front desk called a cab for us which was very cheap (

The only things that positively stood out to me was the size of the shower and rooftop. The shower was huge and I looked forward to my next shower. The only thing is you have to put it all the way hot and wait a few minutes unless you like cool/moderately warm showers. The rooftop was a nice place to hangout. Great view of the town. The pool is very small but it’s a really cool design and it’s great if you manage to get it for yourself. The rooftop is great for pictures.

On a negative note, the staff had very dry personalities. They weren’t friendly and they were sluggish. They were like cranky old people in young bodies. EXCEPT for Paola and Alfonso. They were great people and very helpful. The Wi-Fi was absolutely pathetic. My actual phone service was non existent there so I relied on their Wi-Fi. It would go out for hours at a time. Couldn’t use my phone at all or the Netflix on the TV. And they only have like 6 channels on their cable. The worst thing was that a huge scale power outage happened while I was there. I understand freak incidents happen but I am only criticizing the way they handled it. I take this part seriously because I am an electrician and there’s definitely protocols that should be in place when things like this happen. Especially when you have guests. When it first went out it seems like the staff just stayed where they were and were like “oh well!”. They didn’t go around checking on anybody. They had a generator but they didn’t turn it on until nearly 2 hours later as they had to put in an emergency call for that. Hotel staff should be trained to turn on a generator in the event of an emergency. I was also told the rooms would have AC again after the generator was on, but the AC didn’t work until the middle of the next day. They had electricians come in the next day to perform some work/tests. While me and my wife were getting ready to go out the power was repeatedly getting turned on and off the entire time. You must inform your guests on upcoming electrical work, especially if it involves turning off power.

I’m giving it 3 stars because the main purpose of a hotel room is having somewhere comfortable to sleep, and that’s specific thing was fulfilled (the king bed was very comfy) but the experience as a whole was...

Mold in the unit, pubic hairs on the counter, disgusting shower, and no refunds for inhabitability. This was a horrible experience. We checked into a unit that had mold and was dirty. The mold made it impossible for us to stay in the unit but also the bathroom had pubic hairs on the counter, the shower was disgusting and the service match the poor condition of the hotel. It only took a few minutes before we had scratchy throats and were feeling sick. We asked to be transferred but the other options they had were downgrades and they would not even give us a straight answer if they would charge us more to transfer – I think they were expecting we would transfer at a higher price because we had no other options. We booked a front facing 1 bedroom apartment with the best view the hotel had and they offered to transfer to a studio with no view at a higher price. The front desk person said that she had no power to do anything without the managers approval and the manager would not answer the phone and refused to make herself available to resolve this issue. All we wanted after a few hours of being given the run around was to get a refund. The manager seemed to be playing games with us by not making herself available telling the front desk not to give us her contact information and by not wanting to meet with us even though she was in this small hotel. After hours of sitting at the front of the building waiting for the manager to end her shift and come out she finally showed up and said that we would get a refund within a week. However, she lied, the refund was never processed, and I had to filed a dispute with my credit card company to make sure I would get the refund. It's incredible that this place is still in business and also that a manager like this still has a job running this hotel. I have photos of the black mold in the unit, the pubic hair, and the dirty shower. These will be post on google. The highlight of our trip was that due to this issue we ended up booking another hotel, "El Convento"; we had the best experience there and the...