Charlie B.
Yelp
I should have checked Yelp before booking our stay at the Montage Healdsburg. It's rare for an (ostensibly) five-star hotel to receive an average rating of only 3.5 stars. In fact, I can't think of many other hotels with such a low collective Yelp rating. I find Yelp to be pretty accurate -- usually, 4.5 stars or above from a large number of people is a strong indicator of quality, 4 stars can be hit or miss, and 3.5 stars or below almost always suggests something is wrong. In contrast, I find TripAdvisor to be much more generous and thus less accurate (Montage Healdsburg is much more highly rated on TripAdvisor than on Yelp).
Before I get into the details of this Montage Healdsburg review, just as a point of comparison. There are a lot of hotels that I think are great. For example, I loved the Montage Cabo we went to last year. Unsurprisingly, it got a 4.5 star rating on Yelp, which is basically as high as you can get when there are a decent number of reviewers. I also think highly of the Peninsula Beverly Hills, which also unsurprisingly got a 4.5 star rating on Yelp. In fact, there isn't a single five-star hotel that I admire that didn't get at least 4 stars on Yelp. Post Ranch Inn, Aman in Tokyo, Four Seasons in Lanai, Little Nell in Aspen, Plaza Athenee in Paris, etc., are all super well-reviewed. It's actually hard to find a five-star hotel that only gets 3.5 stars on Yelp. Montage Healdsburg is one of the very few. And sadly, I think it is justified.
My two issues with the hotel: First, the smaller issue. You are forced to valet park. There is simply no other option. You cannot self-park, and you certainly cannot park in front of your room. This is despite the fact that we had the largest suite in the hotel (the Guest House), which had a large circular driveway that could easily fit multiple cars. The hotel is just not designed for cars.
I can understand not allowing guest vehicles to drive to the rooms... but to not even have a self-park option in the general lobby area is bizarre. This is not a city hotel -- it sits on hundreds of acres in the countryside, with plenty of space. But we had to valet every time. For car enthusiasts (of which many love to road trip to wine country), this is especially a bummer.
Moreover, as a result of this design decision, every guest is forced to call a golf cart to get anywhere from the room, or must walk up and down a steep half-mile hill. With elderly guests and very young children, our only choice was to call a cart. Sometimes, the cart would come in 5 minutes. Sometimes 15. Sometimes not at all, and we would have to call again. At night, the temperature would drop to 39 degrees, which makes for a very cold walk and an even colder cart ride. A truly bizarre design decision! Go figure.
The second, and more significant issue was with our specific room, the Guest House. This is the flagship suite at the hotel. The website describes it as "the resort's most impressive accommodation, featuring three bedrooms, indoor and outdoor space in every room plus an outdoor hot tub."
Put simply, the design of the largest suite in the hotel makes ZERO sense. It is supposed to be a three-bedroom suite with a family room and a kitchen. But when you enter the suite through its big double doors, you instead enter into an exterior courtyard. Then the interior rooms are lined up like a dormitory (or cheap motel, or even a prison block), each featuring a self-closing spring mechanism (so each door always slams shut and locks), and each requiring a keycard to enter (see photo 1 below). I have never stayed in a three-bedroom hotel suite where there is NO interior connection or passage between any of the rooms. In other words, there is no way to go from the family room to the bedrooms (or between any of the 3 bedrooms) without first going out into the courtyard -- again, it is 39 degrees at night.
Here is a carefully-considered statement: this is the dumbest luxury suite design I have ever seen, in several decades of traveling. It is an unfathomable setup for families with young children. Either we needed to keep the childrens' bedroom doors propped open at all times, or our four-year-old would need to use a key card to enter his room, only to have the door slam shut and lock behind him. Furthermore, the same four-year-old would need to put on his shoes and jacket and grab his key card every time he wanted to go from his room to get a cup of water in the kitchen, or when he wanted to go from the family room back to his room. I have never seen a multi-bedroom hotel suite like this. And that's because... the Guest House is indeed not a suite at all! It is just four individual rooms, with four individual doors, and four individual locks... no different from getting four normal rooms along the same hallway / corridor in any hotel (or motel) in the world. For this, they charge $14,000 a night BEFORE taxes, or $15,000+ a night all-in. The Guest House is outrageously overpriced. Avoid!
