eugenewong70
Google
My wife and I have stayed at this hotel before and we had a great stay due to (a) the superb location in Umeda, within 5 to 10 minutes of JR Osaka and various subway lines, and (b) being upgraded to an executive club room, due to my Hilton HHonors status, which gave us access to the club lounge. We stayed during Chinese New Year so I assumed the hotel was capable of coping with a higher than normal volume of guests.||This time we stayed together with a family member during Japanese golden week, coincidentally also golden week in China, and the service we received was unsatisfactory, just felt like the hotel was overwhelmed by the combined volume of domestic Japanese tourists and tourists from greater China, on top of the regular flow of tourists from other countries. We were very unhappy and it's highly unlikely that we will stay here again.||To briefly summarise the problems we had:||1. We checked in early and were told the room was not ready, fair enough as we were there before the check-in time of 3pm. Also no upgrade, but again fair enough, upgrades are a privilege but not a right. We left our bags and went out. When we returned that evening, the front counter staff were uncertain if we'd checked in or not and asked to see our passports and my credit card again. This was despite the fact that we had the luggage pick-up card that we'd been given when we checked in earlier.||2. One of my family members had ordered items from Amazon Japan and had them delivered to the hotel before our arrival. When we returned in the evening, we were told that the packages had been delivered to our room already - which by the way did mean that we'd been checked in earlier given that they'd assigned us a room and delivered our packages to the room! Anyway, when we got to the room, we found that only 2 out of 3 packages had been delivered to the room. We called the front desk to ask about the missing 3rd package, and we were told that we'd need to go back to the front desk with our passports before they would even look for the package. We managed to convince them that this step was unnecessary, and the front desk staff agreed to search for the package and either bring it to our room or call us if they couldn't find it. Nearly 90 minutes later, no call and no package. My family member went downstairs and straight away saw the package and took a photo. The staff then told her they couldn't find the package, so she showed them the photo and they gave her the package - but only after she proved to them it was there.||3. We had booked a room for 3 pax, and it was set up with 3 single beds. However, the bathroom only had 2 cups in it. We called guest services and asked for an extra cup to be delivered to our room plus some firmer pillows and extra bottles of water. One hour later, nothing, so we called the front desk and were told that housekeeping were running around dealing with guest request so we needed to be patient. Another hour after that, a staff member arrived with the pillows and water but said that they had run out of bathroom cups. Yes, this massive hotel property didn't have a single extra cup.||The hotel was charging premium rates due to the Japanese golden week, so I paid significantly more this year for a smaller and less comfortable room compared to CNY last year, and had a worse experience. ||The breakfast restaurant was also overwhelmed with long queues from 8am through about 9.30am. ||We stayed at the much newer Hilton Kyoto about 4 months earlier and had a really great experience, the staff were universally friendly and attentive and we encountered no problems at all which was impressive to me given that the property had only launched about 6 or so months before our stay so you'd expect some teething problems but in fact there were none. ||Meanwhile the staff at the Hilton Osaka just seemed to be going through the motions to get through the Japanese golden week, which they routinely mentioned any time I expressed some frustration with our various issues. I did not feel valued as a Hilton HHonors gold member, more like "join the queue, buddy". It did make me question whether I would bother going out of my way to stay at any Hilton property in future purely out of loyalty to the brand.||If you really have to stay here, which is understandable given the fantastic location, I strongly recommend that you try to avoid peak periods like golden week, Christmas and the like.