Firstly you shall see from other reviews that I have written I am often highly praising hotels and restaurants etc (Hilton resort hotel Fort Lauderdale for instance, excellent ).
Unfortunately when a hotel gets it wrong, as this one does, it can ruin your entire day. I booked a table for their ‘famous’ Easter Buffet, for 1:30. We arrived 20 minutes earlier and sat in reception, with several people, eagerly awaiting the buffet restaurant to start letting guests in. When 1:30 arrived we tried the doors to where the buffet normally is, to be told it was the wrong room and were directed to conference rooms . No signage at all that could have assisted with this.
When get got to the back of the hotel there was an extremely long queue, all waiting for them to start allowing people in. Again, very disorganised with no staff explaining what the process was. At 1:35, 5 minutes after the buffet was supposed to have started they slowly, and I really, really mean slowly, started to let people in . The queue was moving extremely slowly , with payments being taken by two people at a table. Once you had paid, you then joined another queue to be allowed to your table. The queue stretched into the car park, temperature mid 80’s. I told my party to wait in the cool inside, whilst I queued in the sun. After 20 minutes ,...Firstly you shall see from other reviews that I have written I am often highly praising hotels and restaurants etc (Hilton resort hotel Fort Lauderdale for instance, excellent ).
Unfortunately when a hotel gets it wrong, as this one does, it can ruin your entire day. I booked a table for their ‘famous’ Easter Buffet, for 1:30. We arrived 20 minutes earlier and sat in reception, with several people, eagerly awaiting the buffet restaurant to start letting guests in. When 1:30 arrived we tried the doors to where the buffet normally is, to be told it was the wrong room and were directed to conference rooms . No signage at all that could have assisted with this.
When get got to the back of the hotel there was an extremely long queue, all waiting for them to start allowing people in. Again, very disorganised with no staff explaining what the process was. At 1:35, 5 minutes after the buffet was supposed to have started they slowly, and I really, really mean slowly, started to let people in . The queue was moving extremely slowly , with payments being taken by two people at a table. Once you had paid, you then joined another queue to be allowed to your table. The queue stretched into the car park, temperature mid 80’s. I told my party to wait in the cool inside, whilst I queued in the sun. After 20 minutes , still outside, the queue seemed to start moving but no, they had just realised that they could have us queue down a side corridor as well. This was 1:50 by now. At 1:55 the queue had not moved at all since being repositioned inside. I estimated that it would be between 2:20 and 2:30 before we reached the paying table. At this stage it became clear booking was irrelevant. I left the queue and spoke to a lady who seemed to be senior / management and expressed the frustration that the queue was not moving , ( again, to emphasise this In 25 minutes we had moved maybe 5 - 10 feet and still had about 40 feet to go). Her response was ‘ sir, the queue is moving’, apparently quite happy with the way guests were being treated .
In short it was a terrible experience , run by staff that seemed inept and lacking in any concern for customers , or qualities that a customer facing role requires. We shall never know if the food was any good as we left and ate at the Cheesecake Factory. That was packed, but we were seated, with no reservation, within 15 mins.
This pretty much ruined much of the Easter Sunday we had so looked forwards to. If there are other people reading this who attended , please also write a review. The WPB airport Hilton shall have made a huge profit from this , which I suspect is all they care about, so the more complaints, the more likely they are to react.
Again, not a general reflection on Hilton, stayed in a couple of really well managed and run ones recently, but I would give this one a miss if I were anybody reading this
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