Reviewed By: Jim Hicks
"OK, here is the scoop on my 5 night stay at the HI Family Suites, soon to be Nick Hotel. I stayed March 13th-18th. Here is the good, the bad and the ugly.
"The good: The hotel is still a very nice value. You get a 4-room suite for $175 per night (not counting those outrageous Florida taxes). The hotel is conveniently located to everything good in Orlando. It is ridiculously convenient to Disney. The lagoon pool being constructed is an amazing monstrosity. No need to go to a water park once it's done.
"The bad: Construction WAS inconvenient. The biggest parking lot out front was a construction zone (why was this not in the back???). Lots of equipment, cement trucks, construction dumpsters being loaded and unloaded all hours of the day and night. The new mall (where the old buffet and restaurant used to be) has the ambience of a preschool cafeteria. It's lacking walls to keep sound from being carried noisely throughout the entire facility. You can have a Nickelodeon theme and still have something palatible to adults and they seriously missed the target here.
"The ugly: The first night we bought the dinner buffet: $50 ($16 plus tax for the 4 of us, our 11 year-old ate for free). There was so little food available I felt like beggars. My wife finally stood and stared down some servers until they brought food out. Dessert was at such a premium that when they brought out a plate of cannolis, a group of teenage girls grabbed ten of them and ran away like freed prisoners. That was the last time we ate buffet dinner.
"Upon arrival we had 4 problems with our room: a table lamp without an on/off stem, the master bedroom closet door was off its track, the fridge did not work, and there was no peep hole in the door (yes, just a hole in the door!). All relatively minor except the hole in the door. Then, one morning I awoke to a guy painting the hall way floor outside our room. It was a nasty black tar-like paint, very stinky. I was wondering if this guy was going to block us in with this paint, and sure enough he did. And this was the same throughout our building. Our rug had black paint on it from our shoes; the elevator had black paint on its floor and then climbing up its wall where someone must have been wiping off their shoes.
"The uglier: So after the black paint incident, I called for a manager to come up. I got 'Bill' and 'Jose.' As we all stood in the midst of wet, black paint, I waited for the apologies and what would surely be at least one night comped. It was like a Mexican stand-off. Bill agreed to fix the 4 things, apologized that he had not been informed about the painting (not for my problems) and promised to fix them the next day, when we would be gone at Disney. Of course, the next day came and went without anything being fixed. My furious wife called and insisted on a new fridge so her restaurant left-overs could be kept refrigerated. We got that and the peep hole fixed that night. The promise of the other two minor things to be fixed the next day never happened as well. Woe to the person who gets room 967.
"So the moral of the story here is bad management, and what surely must be competing interests among construction personnel and hotel staff. And, here are two other questions: (1) Will all the Nickolodeon cosmetic make-overs actually make the Holiday Inn Family Suites a better hotel? (2) Will Holiday Inn Family Suites make more money by staying open during construction than they will lose by turning off long-standing customers who stayed during the construction?
"It's tough being in the hospitality industry. :-("
Next review: "LOVED IT!! What an incredible place! The kids could not get enough..."
