P. J. Reed

Review of Hilton Hotel Fort Worth

I go out of town on personal trips at least severa...

I go out of town on personal trips at least several weekends every year, and I occasionally travel for business; I always stay at Hiltons when I have the chance. With that said, this is probably the worst Hilton I've stayed at.

First, there's no self-parking, only valet parking. If you don't want to spend an extra $25/night (they advertise it as $22/night but don't tell you that there's also tax and a "service fee"), your closest option is a parking garage about four blocks away.

We arrived in the evening to check in for a four-day long stay, and they gave us a room, so we went up to it. First, it wasn't even the room I had booked; I booked a standard king and I got a twin double. But more than that, there was a ladder in the bathtub, a hole in the ceiling, and the sink had been dismantled. We went down to the front desk to ask for a new room, and the receptionist told us the room they placed us in was out of service, and they were overbooked and had no unoccupied rooms. Not his fault, so I don't blame him, and he did manage to get us a room at the Sheraton instead.

The Sheraton treated us just fine for the night we were there, but they didn't have any room for the rest of the weekend. Fortunately, the Hilton did, so they offered to upgrade our room to a corner king suite for our troubles. That's nice of them, but it was still rather inconvenient to have a three hour window during the afternoon when we had nowhere to store our luggage. The front desk manager in the morning when we arrived to check on our room was rather grumpy and looked like she was tired of talking to us before we had even done anything, but at least we got a room.

The "corner king suite" was honestly pretty mediocre, and I'm not sure it had much more usable space than any standard king I've been in at a Hampton or a Garden Inn. There were some questionable choices in the room layout, such as no door for privacy between the sink and the rest of the room, and a short little hallway that one had to go through to get from the sink to the shower and toilet. We had a refrigerator, which was nice, but it was placed inside a cabinet that was just small enough to make it hard to open the refrigerator door.

Also, one normally expects to find a small nook with an ice machine and some vending machines out in the hallways, right? Well, at one point I needed to go get some ice, and there was none on our floor. I've been to hotels that only had ice machines on every other floor, so I went down one to look there... and still nothing. I decided to just go down to the front desk, and they told me I could get ice from the freezer in the concession stand. Inside it were zip-loc baggies of ice that had apparently slightly melted and fused together, making a single large block of ice, which is not useful for basically anything you might want ice cubes for.

What made that really inconvenient, of course, is that you have to take the elevator to get down there. There are only three modestly-sized, slow elevators to service the entire 15 floors. When the hotel is fully booked, that means there is a line at the elevators all day long, even at two in the morning. When we finally checked out, I had to wait almost thirty minutes for an elevator to pass by that wasn't completely full.

To top it off, when the valet brought my car up front -- which took another ten minutes -- he had apparently taken the courtesy of fiddling with the environment controls in my car and had left the AC running at full blast. I feel like I should've written down my odometer reading to make sure he didn't go joy riding in it.

I still like Hiltons in general, but I won't be staying at this one again. The Sheraton and the Omni nearby are both nicer options.