The Palms Place is a exercise in modern splendor. Stylish and ultra chic, this hotel offers up some of the best accommodations this city has to offer. First off, I must introduce myself as a complete and utter hotel snob. I have Platinum Status at SPG and Diamond at Hyatt and those are my cheap hotel selections. I love luxury and services and I am a very picky traveler. This hotel is absolutely amazing in its contemporary modernity but I had more than my fair share of problems for such a nice place. First the good things:
The room I finally ended up with was a dream come true. I booked a one bedroom suite, well worth the upgrade in price. Remember these are really condominiums and expensive ones at that. WIth this suite not only do you get a large and lavish guest powder room but you get a spectacular ultra modern stainless steel fitted kitchen complete with Sub Zero refrigerator, Gaggenau stove, Fisher Paykel dishwasher drawer, stainless micro, stainless minibar, full sink and built in dining lounge for four, perfect for breakfast in the morning and armwrestling at 2:00AM. This place is huge! It is also occupies a corner position (all one bedroom suites do) with wrap around floor to ceiling glass window walls through out the unit with stunning panoramic views. There is a working fireplace in the luxurious modern living room as will as a huge plasma television, glass & polished steel work desk, huge sectional and two modern leather chairs and a chaise. Beautiful metallic powder blue black out drapes and a lacy silver sheer curtain gives you two beautiful options to control the light, not that you want to hide this spectacular view. It was stupid of them not to electrify them. It has only been open for a couple of weeks and the drapes are already having problems from the pulls.
The Master Suite is accessed via a long hall of built in, floor to ceiling closet systems with flush full height doors, internal lighting, internal dressers all lit with a very chic custom indirect lighting fixture. The lighting in this hotel is particularly good - everything is on dimmers and is very glamorously lit. There is also two huge sliding panels that slide open to the living room creating a large open plan space and allowing the bedroom to enjoy the corner position. A large free standing super modern egg shaped air tub sits on white marble floors in the master suite adjacent to the living room. I loved this tub! Air is so much better than those filthy jets and it's big and deep and sits next to the window wall. The bed is fabulously comfortable and the master bedroom has its own 50 inch plasma tv. All the walls are dark wood, leather, marble or gorgeous lacquered midnight blue with a subtle airbrushed sunset line at knee height. The kitchen and living room floors throughout are a dark black wood with inlayed dark grey carpet with a stainless steel edge in the living room. The master bedroom has the same grey carpet detail around the bed with the rest of the room, dressing hall, entry hall and master bath being white marble.
The master bath has is quite large with a private water closet concealed by a sliding frosted glass panel door. Two vanity sinks separated by and annoying modern globe light dangling from the ceiling (looks good but not user friendly), is directly across the huge two person shower inclosed in white marble and glass. It has two shower wands and a rain shower head.
The entrance hall also has a sleek hidden door that opens into a full size washer and dryer room. This place is stunning. The view is amazing. There are two section of the window wall which slide open onto a huge wrap around terrace with glass wall railings. My room was on the 51st floor so the views were far and wide and none are better in the city except on top of the Stratus Sphere Tower. The nighttime view of the city side is breathtaking.
THE PROBLEMS:
Since this is a new hotel I can forgive some of this stuff. I had booked a three night stay and decided to stay just one night and do another hotel the last two nights. They have a four day cancelation policy or they charge the full rate. I sent several emails to the hotel all which were responded to by a "message delayed" email stating that they got my message but it hadn't been delivered yet. It also said I didn't need to send another. I did many times with the same response. On the last day before cancelation I decided to FAX my cancelation from my London hotel and requested confirmation. Not only did they not respond they didn't even cancel it. I was presented with a three day stay at check in. I was rather infuriated and normally I would have made a fit right then and there, but I was so blown away at how stunning the lobby was I decided to check the room out before my rant. To my complete and total surprise the room not only met my expectations but exceed it. In all of my communications with them I had request a room with a strip view and a high floor. Even when I checked in I asked if I had a strip view and a high floor and she said I had a room with a spectacular view. Floor 19 on the mountain side. Now if I went out on the balcony I could see a small part of the strip but you really could not see it. And floor 19 of a 60 story tower is not a high floor unless you to dumb to count higher than that.
I stewed in my room about the view and the fact they didn't cancel my second and third nights for a while and decided I would call the front desk and ask if they had a higher room floor on the strip side. Based on their answer I would stay or demand the cancelation. I asked if I could move to a room on the strip side on a higher floor for the next two nights. The man on the phone asked why I didn't want to move right away and I said I had been in the room for a couple of hours already. He said he had a room on the 51st floor that faced the strip and he would move me right then. So I decided to stay, the view was stunning and the terrace was wider and wrapped continuously around the suite. The lower the floor the smaller the balcony and the higher the larger and more continuous the terrace.
The house keeping here is terrible. I decided to leave a rather large tip with a nice note requesting extra special cleaning and boy did they respond. The room was like new when I got back. It is a shame you have to do that but if you are staying here for multiple nights you will get a much fresher room if you drop a $10-$20 tip.
I used the hotel's same day dry cleaning services to clean a brand new Tommy Bahama's long sleeve silk shirt I purchased just for this trip. I wore it on my first day and thought I would clean it and wear it again for the trip home. They cleaned and delivered to my bed at some point in the day. When I was dressing to leave the hotel I took the shirt out from the package and to my extreme disappointment they had washed the shirt instead of dry cleaning it! It had shrunk so much I no longer could button it closed. I needed another inch and half of shirt fabric!
I complained and they sent up a security staff to give me forms to fill out and I visually showed him the shirt on me. The hotel manager said he would talk with the dry cleaning staff and see what they would do in a few days. So they did not do anything at that moment and I am hoping I will not have to call and argue it with them later.
24 hour room service for breakfast, lunch and dinner has an extremely limited menu and is not that good. It is expensive as all room service is. The one time I ordered, I pushed my cart into the hall at 8:30 AM and it was still there at 8:30 PM. Not a good sign. There is nothing worse than staying in the ultimate room, a room you don't want to leave, and having access to bad room service! I would have ordered all my meals in if had been better.
I ate a SIMONS, the new restaurant on the sixth floor. Very good food, very beautiful people. Very expensive. An excellent sushi bar and chef is also here. The staff and help has a huge amount of work to get their act together. The sushi chef had zero assistance and was wasting a huge amount of time doing his own support and prep work so things took way too long. The waiter was non existent. As I finished dishes they would not remove them so I had to pile them up adjacent to me which is rather difficult and a problem at a sushi bar. The chef was clearly distressed about it but it is very unsanitary and inappropriate for a sushi chef to remove used plates. After 10 minutes of actual waiting with a pile of dishes I whipped out my iPhone and turned on the timer and set my phone on the counter for all to see. It took another 5 minutes before the waiter came and removed them. The shocking thing is that the managers and many other waiters would congregate near me and never paid attention to it. It is a good restaurant but they have serious service issues at this point. They also allowed non-sushi eating guests to sit and hangout drinking at the sushi bar even though they had a huge bar in the restaurant. That was not appropriate or fair to the chef either.
All in all, this hotel is stunning but it still suffering from its opening shake down cruise. I will definitely give it another chance but if the service doesn't rise to the heights of the spectacular design, there are better served properties in town.
JD from Dallas
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC.
Would I recommend this hotel to my best friend?
most likely
I recommend this hotel for:
Young singles, An amazing honeymoon, A romantic getaway, Girlfriend getaway, People with disabilities, Older travelers, Pet owners, Tourists
I do not recommend this hotel for:
Families with young children, Families with teenagers
I selected this hotel as a top choice for:
Business meeting / Event, Other