If You Can't be a GREAT Hotel, At Least Be a GREAT BIG Hotel
Written: May 27 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Spacious, comfortable rooms, excellent meeting facilities
Cons: Mediocre service, HIGH prices, now charging for parking too...
The Bottom Line: If you want a HUGE corporate hotel, this Wyndham is for you, but you can do MUCH better on price and service elsewhere in Dallas...
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| mrkstvns's Full Review: WYNDHAM ANATOLE |
A week or so ago, I was in Dallas for business, and the company put me up for a couple days in the Wyndham Anatole, which is a very large, business oriented hotel in the Market Center area, just outside downtown.
Did I say "large"? Enormous is more like it. The hotel comprises several interlinked buildings and, according to the hotel guide in my room, includes well over 1,500 rooms. I usually consider anything over about 500 to be a big hotel, so yeah, "enormous" is an appropriate adjective for this place.
Everything's bigger in Texas. The Wyndham tries to prove it not just with the size of the hotel, but with the size of their price tags too. When you're paying $200 a night and up, you should expect great service. But as you might have guessed, what you really get is okay service at the Wyndham. Not great. Just okay.
Instead of efficient doormen who quickly unload your baggage and pass it off to a bellman who carts it to your room el pronto, you get a pimply faced teen working part time when he's not in classes, opening the door for you, but without much more than a "howzit hangin'?"
Checkin was adequate, but neither remarkably fast nor remarkably friendly. I found this to be the case throughout the hotel. Things were competent enough -- usually -- but never stellar nor with the feeling that I was dealing with a true hospitality professional. At the prices the Wyndham charges, they should be sending the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders over to my room for some nude body massages. I really think that whoever coined the phrase "you get what you pay for" is the biggest idiot there ever was. Rare is the hotel where you'll ever come close to realizing the level of service that you pay for -- it happens -- but not at big American corporate chain hotels, like this one. It only takes a couple of business trips to remind me just why it is that I really prefer being in Latin America or Europe --- places where the word "service" still has some meaning, and places where the word "client" garners some respect. Service isn't a "commodity" that you can deliver with temp workers making minimum wage -- good hotels realize that.
Let's see if the room does any better...
Step Into My West Dallas Lair...
The room is first class all the way. The furniture is classy, in a traditional fashion, and its well constructed, well maintained, and utterly comfortable.
I love a good easy chair, and one of the bonuses of business travel is that the company never really tries to save a dime, so I can pretty much count on much nicer digs than I get when it's my dime that I'm spending. Pulling up a big chair with an ottoman and kicking back with a couple brewskis from the mini-bar as I channel surf the cable offerings is part of the reason I really do enjoy business travel (though I still don't like business travel as much as I enjoy personal travel, when I can have little people jumping on the bed to entertain me).
The bathroom is just about perfect, with sparkling clean ceramic tile, a nice big shower enclosure, and some of the best smelling soaps I've used in a long time. My only worry is that one of my colleagues will smell it on me and think I've gone maricon. Maybe I should buy a bar of soap off the discount hotels across the street just to be safe...naaah.
So let's run down the canonical checklist....yep, the ironing board is there, so is the mandatory coffee maker, the TV is a big 25" inch set and it gets a good 40+ channels including a couple spanish language channels, so no nit-picking from me on the TV count. Hair dryer works fine, not that I have a lot of hair to dry. And the de rigeur mini-bar is well stocked with hideously overpriced snack and drink selections. Hmmm. what else? 2 phones including data jacks, and nice big picture windows looking out over the infamous Stemmons Freeway...
Around the Hotel...
Some hotels are predominantly resort hotels, some are predominantly business hotels. The Wyndham is solidly business, as is obvious from a walk around the ground level and the mezzanine level. There are at least 2 or 3 enormous ballrooms, several lecture halls, and literally dozens of meeting rooms on every hallway. This hotel could probably handle a convention of several thousand attendees -- they really do have that kind of capacity.
The grounds are nicely landscaped, and there's a couple of different swimming pools. The one that's outside at the back of the property is nice with a spacious deck and attractive landscaping. The one inside near the front of the hotel is rather, ummmm, "average" at best. Actually, I'm being generous and I'm trying to avoid adjectives that are best used when describing the products of the Hoover company.
Truthfully, the indoor pool is dinky, small, teeny, tiny, and in all other ways, completely inadequate. If that weren't bad enough, it's placed in an inconvenient location that's kind of behind the front desk. It has no view (unless you really like looking at a service road), and it's not a particularly pleasant place to be. Too small for laps, too ugly for leisure, I can't imagine this indoor "pool" being right for anyone.
Strolling through the atrium is very nice, and there are several boutique shops selling womens clothes, luggage, knick-knacks, and a nice little shop selling Mexican artisania stuff -- and fairly good quality stuff (though at prices that are easily 2-3 times what I pay in Mexico City).
Up until about today, outdoor parking has been free at the Wyndham -- as it should be considering that the hotel has a somewhat suburban location with expansive lots that surround the hotel -- not to mention that there are dozens of hotel chains around this property, none of which charge for parking. Nonetheless, the Wyndham seems to think they can rip off guests, so they're in the process of installing new gates in all the parking lots, and those gates should be online within the next week or so. Parking will be $10 in the outdoor lots, and about $15 for valet. Can you shout "SCREW YOU GUESTS"?
Sure! I knew ya can!! And obviously, so can Wyndham...and with FAR more volume and feeling than you can pack into it.
Minus one star off the bottom line rating for the unjustified new parking fees.
Food and Drink...
The food services are fairly typical of jumbo corporate hotels -- okay quality, but not exactly inspired, but at prices that make a pentagon budget line look like bus fare. There's a nice restaurant off the main lobby that serves big steaks and similar hearty fare, but at prices in the $25 and up range for entrees. I loved strolling through the airy feeling atrium area, but the Esquina restaurant, though informal in attitude and with lower prices, was still pretty expensive by my standards, with entrees in the upper teens for dishes that would cost under $10 at most downtown restaurants.
Beers cost me $5.25 in the atrium bar or at the Gators Lounge (open after 9pm). That's for a Shiner -- not for some fancy schmancy import. For the record, Al's Beverage Mart over on Harry Hines charged me about the same price for a 6-pack of Shiner. Needless to say, Al got himself a sale and I drank in my room rather than in the lounges downstairs...
Heck, the friggin' coffee was almost $2.50 in the atrium each morning. Yeah, it's Starbucks, but it was still just the inoffensive Morning House Blend stuff, not even the really good Starbucks strains...
Generally, I'm unimpressed by the very, very high prices and average quality of the food and drinks. If you stay at the Wyndham, head downtown if you want good eats (try Monica's Aca y Alla, over in Deep Ellum -- their food was excellent).
Location
I don't really like this location.
It's not convenient to downtown and you really need a car to get anywhere. Sure, it's right off the freeway, and it's only 5 or 10 minutes to downtown (except during rush hour), so if you are a local, you might not understand why I think the location stinks, but a few miles from downtown might as well be 50 miles from downtown for most non-driving visitors because you can't really walk anywhere.
Although the Market Center area is okay when you're close to the Stemmons Freeway, you don't have to wander more than a couple blocks beyond the freeway to quickly get into more marginal, industrial feeling neighborhoods.
The Market Center is not really an upscale area -- it wants to be, but it isn't. There are some big name hotels, like this one (and the Rennaisance), right next to the freeway, but it's an area that really seems like it would be more comfortable with names like Days Inn and Best Western (which are also here, and at 1/3 the cost).
Bottom Line
I kind of like this place (especially on somebody else's dime), but I can't help but feel that this is a poseur hotel -- not really as upscale as equivalent downtown hotels, but it really wants the respect that the real hotels get. This hotel reminds me of a guy who makes a million bucks selling mobile homes and yet wonders why he's not held in quite the same esteem as J. Paul Getty.
The Wyndham is a nice hotel to stay in, and a nice hotel to do business in, but not a hotel with truly honest gentility. Frankly, if I could stay anywhere in Dallas, at the price level of the Wyndham, I'd rather be at the Adolphus or the St. Germain, but sadly enough, my company doesn't let mere peons book their own travel, and so I go where I'm told...and right now, that means the Wyndham Anatole.
This is a very nice hotel that starts off at five stars based on its apparent level of quality, but minus one for ho-hum service and high prices, and minus one more for stiff-arming clients with outrageous new parking fees. So overall, 3 stars -- which is about right on the overall value proposition. Yeah, it's pretty nice, but you pay out the yin-yang for it and now you'll be paying even more with "hidden" gotcha fees like the parking screw -- which really irritates me in a mediocre location like this, though I might not complain if it were a true downtown hotel.
Until next time, see you on the road. As always, I'll be sniffing out the biggest bang for the buck, even when the buck isn't my own.
Recommended:
Yes
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