| Overall |  | Comfort | |
| Food | N/A | Service |  |
| Convenience | | Prices | |
The Hotel Monaco is a Kimpton hotel located in the heart of downtown Denver, at 17th and Champa. Very nicely appointed, and coverted from two older buildings, it maintains Kimpton’s quirky-but-luxurious reputation. Margie and I stayed there overnight on Saturday-Sunday as part of a One Night Vacation enabled by my in-laws (by their watching Katherine).
Comfort: The hotel itself is reasonably laid out. The large lobby on the ground floor has a lot of well-placed easy chairs and sofas, with books and games and so forth on the shelves. Complementary coffee is served there in the morning, cider and hot chocolate was there in the afternoon for a time, and there’s a wine hour reception in the evenings that included a massage chair and a Wii.
Our room was on the top (7th) floor, with a nice view across the Colorado National Bank toward the mountains. The bed was comfy and the room was roomy. The bathroom was quite large, to accommodate a 2-person jacuzzi tub at the end of it (though the towel racks and hooks were poorly placed both in terms of the steps to the tub and the shower door).
The TV was not as easily viewable from the bed as it might have been (had we chosen to watch TV).
Internet access is $10/night, wired or wireless. The connection and latency were quite good; Margie was able to fire up City of Heroes with no problems.
The Hotel Monaco is “pet friendly,” and we saw numerous folks with small dogs. For those who don’t arrive with a pet, you can ask housekeeping to bring you a goldfish bowl. They also have the standard exercise room, a spa, meeting space, etc. and so forth.
Food: We didn’t eat at the in-house restaurant, Panzano, but the menu looked yummy and I’d like to go there some time.
Convenience: Mixed score here because, face it, driving to any location in downtown Denver means maneuvering around one-way streets and 45-degree angles. Valet parking is available for $28/night. The hotel is, though, just a block or two from the Light Rail, and only a few blocks from the 16th Street Mall and its free shuttles to major bus hubs and Union Station.
And that’s the upside to the Hotel Monaco’s convenience; once there, everything in Downtown Denver is an easy walk or shuttle ride, which includes the theater district, LoDo, Coors Field, and zillions of restaurants. The Pepsi Center and Mile High Stadium are either fairly long walks, short taxi rides, or a combo of the Mall Shuttle and Union Station light rail for a few hops.
Service: The lobby staff were young and friendly, but not very … effective.
We arrived at 1 p.m. or so, which was before check-in time. They were more than happy to hold our bags while we went out for some lunch and shopping. We got back at 3, which was check-out time, only to be told the room still wasn’t ready. And it wasn’t ready at 4, either, when I got up from a lobby chair to go over and ask (though I was assured the desk clerk would go and check on it). It was finally ready at 4:30, but I only found that out because I went up and asked again; nobody had checked, and nobody came over to let us know what was going on. All we got was a mild apology for the wait. Not that sitting in the lobby with my lovely wife reading and playing sudoku was purgatory or something, but it was handled annoyingly.
Case the second: Sunday morning we tried out the jacuzzi tub. Which didn’t jacuzz. Now, we could have gotten up, gotten dressed, called housekeeping, asked them to come and check on the tub, by which time it would have been getting close to check-out time. Or we could have just enjoyed the tub, sans bubbles. Which we did. But when we mentioned it at checkout, all we got was a mild apology and an inquiry if we’d called down with the problem.
I’m not saying in either case that I was expecting someone to fall on their sword, but a more heartfelt apology would have been welcome. A comped drink at Panzano, or a reduced room charge would have earned some serious gold stars.
The third case was small but telling. As we were (ahem) waiting in the lobby for our room, the hotel manager (I guess) decided that they would celebrate Earth Hour from 3:30-4:30 pm, since at 8:30 it would be “too dark.” So he turned off all the lights in the lobby. Really. The wall sconces. The overheads, which were first dimmed, then turned off. We were asked if we were okay with the other lights being off while we were reading, but since the lamps behind us were still lit, we were okay. Then, a few minutes later … someone turned off those lamps. I reached around a minute later and pointedly turned one back on. I overall appreciated the Earth Hour gesture, but it was taken to an inappropriate extreme (the windowless lobby really does get dark) for the folks impacted (i.e., us and others in the lobby).
Now, again, the staff was all quite friendly and jovial. We had a nice chat with the desk clerk, for example, when we got back from dinner, and when we asked when checkout was, he offered unsolicited that he could put us on late checkout at 2, rather than Noon, which actually worked out well with our brunch the next day. But … little things like the above made it a less-than-sterling service experience.
Prices: Not cheap. The main rooms are $135-145/night, but there are usually some deals to be had (there was a $109/night one being touted in ads while we there).
Overall: I enjoyed our stay, glitches notwithstanding, and would both recommend the place to others and go back there again myself. In comparison to our similar stay at the Brown Palace in November 2008, ago, the room was bigger and nicer, and the service more personable but less effective.
Hotel Monaco, 1717 Champa Street, Denver, CO 80202 – 800.990.1303