The Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta is pretty close to the Georgia Dome downtown, so I thought this would be a good place to stay for our short trip to the city. There's not much in the area, especially if you are here for the weekend since I imagine downtown Atlanta is pretty deserted. We drove up from the airport in our rental car which was taken by the valets (mucho expensive at $40/day). They were polite and helpful, but then they should be at these prices.

The hotel is very large but thankfully has a SPG Gold/Platinum check-in line. The general line, when we arrived, was fairly long. In any case, we didn't have to wait too long and we received courteous service from the front desk staff who tried to find us an upgraded room without me having to ask. Even though I'm an SPG Gold, it was not to be as the hotel was fairly full, so we ended up on one of the SPG floors. Nothing special, I can assure you, in fact it was a little tight. The furniture was beginning to show its age, with chips and a bit of grim. On a positive note, I really like the Sony clock radios! There was Starbucks in the room. The bathroom was fine, although we were missing some bars of soap and we called down to Service Express to have those delivered (took about 10-15 minutes to get through and then another 30-45 minutes to have the soap delivered).

Housekeeping is not on the ball here either as there was lots of empty food trays and trash in the halls on our floor. The general area of the hotel are nice enough, but there are people of all kinds wandering in off the street into the hotel. To be honest, it's a bit of a confusing hotel and easy to get lost since things are labeled well.

We were driving out to meet some friends that evening and my biggest complaint about the hotel is the valet parking. The whole point of paying $40/day is that you don't have to walk out to your car and get it, i.e. put all this effort into getting into your car. It took me about five calls over the space of 10 minutes before I finally reached someone in the parking department who assures me my car will be ready when I get down there. (Note, you have to go through "Service Express" for EVERYTHING, so it just makes it take longer because sometimes they aren't so quick to pick up either. Then they have to transfer me to the parking department.) Ten minutes later, my wife and I are at the door... no car. No tip either. This mess happened again when we finally checked out of the place. Next time, I will try to find a place in one of the parking garages around the hotel myself.

We did not eat at the restaurant or order room service at the hotel, so we can't comment on the food.

My wife used the fitness room once and she said it was nice and roomy.

Will we come back? The hotel certainly didn't wow us, but it wasn't the worst SPG experience we've ever had. We'll likely try out some of the other properties in the area, or get one of the ones up in Buckhead instead.

Review submitted by GK.

Posted at July 22, 2007 9:10 AM