Heather Hamrick

Review of Park Central Hotel

We are frequent visitors to NYC but typically stay...

We are frequent visitors to NYC but typically stay with friends because hotels are costly. However, given COVID, hotels are now very affordable, so we decided to stay three nights over Halloween weekend.

PROS:
- cost was less than $100 night WITH parking. The hotel is working with a parking garage about 2 blocks away where you can get parking include. This perk sold it for us and ultimately why we booked. So if you are coming to the city by car, it s definitely worth to book here
- LOCATION - so close to everything: Times Square, Central Park, great food options within 100ft of the hotel
- gym is open and is quite large and well equipped
- clean - the hotel is older but it was well kept
- huge rooms! For a NYC hotel, the rooms were well above average size

CONS:
- there is a ton of construction in front of the building, essentially the whole block where an Uber would drop you off or where you could easily pull up to drop-off luggage was not accessible. We found this annoying but not the hotel s fault
- amenities fee for amenities . The hotel charged a $25/night facilities fee of WiFi, making phones call using your room phone (who does this anymore anyway?), gym and 10% off at nearby eateries since the food options at the hotel were closed. The good news is the fee use to be ~$40/night when the hotel bar was open, etc, so at least they made accommodations given the circumstances. The issue we had was the 10% off didn t work at either of the places we tired: the Starbucks and the bakery both directly downstairs / in the same building. The front desk told us to just show our room key and the discount would be honored. Two tries and two denied discounts later, we were annoyed. We brought this up to management and they said they d get it straightened out. They ended up only charging two nights facilities fee to us as a courtesy. My word of advice to management is to ensure you have those discounts buttoned up or guests start to feel the burn of the facilities fee
- we tried to call downstairs ~4 times to ask about various things, they didn t answer the phone...not once
- they said you can request a fridge in your room upon check-in but one isn t guaranteed, it s based on availability. We asked and said they were out. I find it a little hard to believe they were out of fridges when the hotel was very empty, when they use to supply fridges to a much fuller hotel pre-Covid
- we booked through the hotel website directly. Currently they are running a promotion where you get three free perks when booking with them. One of the perks we chose was a $5 free Starbucks card. The card was sent via email, however when we went to use the card, it said it had already been used. We told management who apologized but didn t rectify it.

In summary, I would stay here 100x times more at the rate we paid and I m honestly not that picky about hotels in a general sense, but if this was pre-Covid paying ~$200+ a night, I d be more than a little annoyed. I know staffing is limited due to covid and things aren t as they use to be, but taking all of those things into consideration, a hotel should still be able to service their guests who are staying appropriately by answering the phone and ensuring what they state in their pricing is what you actually get.