Hotel Booked by PO for Segments of World Cruise

[Suekersh]

I would appreciate your thoughts on the following. Sorry it's a long post.

We booked segments of the Arcadia World cruise 2014 as soon as they were released last year. We booked a full package with flights, 3 night hotel stay in LA and 3 nights in Dubai before flying back.

At the time of booking we had a choice of extra on board credit, 3 free nights in LA hotel or free connecting flights from Manchester. We chose the hotel option as it was worth more.

The hotel PO have reserved is the Crowne Plaza in Beverley Hills. I did look at reviews when we first booked and they were mixed but nothing drastically bad just not excellent. These did not worry us at all and as it is very central close to Rodeo Drive we were happy.

Recently the Hotel sent me an advertising e mail with a link to reviews recently posted about the hotel.

These were dreadful. Dirty rooms, dirty and stained bed linen, bathrooms which need updating, showers which don't work and baths which don't drain. Very noisy interconnecting rooms which sound like next door are in your room. I am not just talking one or two bad reviews but virtually every review posted in the last couple of months. There are also some fair/ good reviews but are outweighed with poor ones.

I contacted PO and asked them to look into this and give some reassurance that the hotel had been checked out and in particular how the rooms would be allocated.

Good service from PO in that I had a return email within 24 hours saying our query had been passed on and a phone call last night to discuss it.

The person who phoned said that PO would not just put their guests anywhere and the hotel had to meet a standard. She went on to say that PO had block booked standard rooms. (These appear to be the ones with the worst reviews). She said the reviews could be unfair as anyone could post a review. I told her I would agree with that and reviews are subjective but these came from the hotels own web site. She said she could put forward our request not to be allocated an interconnecting room because of noise problems or she would ring the hotel to find out how much an upgrade would cost us for a better room. We have asked her to do this.

We are not happy to pay out more money to get a reasonable standard of room. Even if we pay the extra there is no guarantee that the room will be any cleaner than a standard room.

Do you think PO could/should do more to look into these awful reviews?

Sue

[Dancing Queen]

Hopefully someone on the forum will have stayed at this hotel and can give you an honest opinion ( preferably one that is pretty recent )

Over the years we have been in hotels pre and post cruise organised by the cruise company ( although not P&O ) and have always found the choice to be of a very high standard.

Hope you manage to get it sorted, is there no chance you could take extra OBC and book your own hotel, it may not be as good a deal but at least you would have the control of choosing where you stay.

[david63]

I have just had a look on Trip Advisor (yes I know that you have to take the reviews on there with a "pinch of salt") and I have to say that it would not be an hotel that I would choose to stay in.

When I look on TA I only look at the Terrible reviews, but within that group I look at the date of the review and the number of reviews made by the contributor. In the case of this hotel I can hear alarm bells and the responses from the hotel are very bland and "reading from the script".

Is it possible to change hotel or change to one of the other "free" offers? The last thing that you want at the start of your holiday is to spend it trying to sort out the hotel

[Manoverboard]

In 2012 we booked Hotels through P&O for stays in Bangkok and Dubai ... our rooms were excellent in both in spite of a number of dodgy reviews on Trip Advisor.

However ... if you opted to stay in the Beverley Hills area on a P&O freebee then the Crowne Plaza is probably the best you can reasonably expect, personally I would stay somewhere else but in the certain knowledge that I would have to pay through the nose for it.

[Suekersh]

Thanks everyone for your replies.

The only hotel PO was offering at the time of booking was this one. No choice. We wanted to do the full booking with PO so that the package was covered by them. They include transport to the hotel from the airport and then to the ship.

I am not concerned about how dated the hotel is or the lack of facilities but I am concerned about cleanliness and think that PO should also be concerned about it. One of the reviews states they found blood stained sheets on the bed and used cotton buds on the bed.

Even if we do decide to pay the price to upgrade this will still not ensure the cleanliness of the room or hotel. I will wait for PO to contact us again in two weeks after we return from Ventura before making a decision.

Sue

[Southwinds]

Isn't this difficult ? We all see ghastly reviews of P&O on line now and the same comments dirty sheets etc....heaps appear on the the various face book groups....and we all know what we think of P&O I do think grumblers. are more likely to post than people with a compliment.... We have stayed twice in P&O choice hotel ons segments and both times they were excellent.

[Manoverboard]

Has anybody ever thought about taking their own sheets as opposed to 17 pairs of shoes ?