Rachel Pym

Review of ANA Hotel Sydney

Don t waste your time or money at Shangrila Sydney...

Don t waste your time or money at Shangrila Sydney. We arrived yesterday 7/8/20 for a 3 day staycation. It s been a rough year. I work in a Medical centre and these past 6 months of Covid have been very stressful. My husband runs his own business and keeping on track has been hard work for him, often working 7 days a week to keep the business and his staff afloat. We need a break.

Check in was fine but we were NOT told that only one food outlet is open in the hotel. I found that out at 6:30pm when I called guest services to get a booking for dinner. I was told only Altitude is open and that we could only get a table at 8pm.

We arrived at the restaurant just before 8, no one was at the desk. After waiting 10 minutes someone finally came. We were told we had to use our phones to register our details for contact tracing. Fair enough except we don t take our phones to dinner, we prefer to talk to each other. After some discussion the waitress eventually begrudgingly wrote our details down. Why wasn t I told this when I booked thr table?

Next it turns out there s no booking in our name. The girl made several calls and we could hear her saying but they claim they did book She made us feel totally unwelcome and as if we were lying. There was now about 12 people behind us, no social distancing.

Eventually the girl went and got someone else who also wanted the whole story. Eventually after about 15 minutes we were taken to a table. We were given the menu, a set menu at AU$145 per head. I just wanted one light course but there was not an option for this. So for 3 evening meals during our stay we would pay close to $1000 without drinks and there was no other option except room service.

We walked out and went to our room and ordered room service and were told it would be 45 minutes. We asked them to fast track it. It came quite quickly but my salmon was cold because it had only been cooked on one side. The other side was completely raw. I d had a caesar salad in the room at lunch time and the chicken was pink in the middle and the bread rolls were so hard i couldn t break one open, inedible.

I went down and asked to speak to the duty manager to tell her everything. Angela said she would look into it. When we hadn t heard anything from her by 12 the next morning we booked a room at The Four Seasons and left. We stood outside waiting for our car and were not helped at all with our luggage.

When we checked out we were told I would get an email detailing the bill. We didn t want to pay for the 3 nights booked just the awful one we spent there. Nothing arrived. I called 5 hours later and was told that it looked like we were still in the system as being there! My husband had to leave our new hotel to go back to the Shangri-La to sort it out. When he got there we had already been checked out!

Total incompetence from start to finish. Rooms old, dark and tired and the food was awful, expensive and limited. Thank God for The Four Seasons, loving it here!