Ensight – Jeremy Wright

As I’ve started travelling more, I thought it might be useful for Google searchers to have a perspective on some of the hotels I’m staying in.

The first 2 of these are both “high class” hotels who should have scored stellarly, considering they were each 250-400$/night (I wasn’t paying).

The Hyatt Regency Vancouver isn’t the most glamorous hotel in the city (I’d leave that to the Fairmont hotel here, which is the equivalent to Toronto’s Royal York Hotel). It’s nice though. Located right in the heart of downtown, walking distance from everything, the location is great. The lobby is spacious and has free high speed wi-fi.

Signage for events, concierge and other key areas is easy and functional. The staff are very, very, very courteous and very good at what they do. I was always greeted by name, every call was perfectly punctual and they were totally friendly (even when my credit card was declined).

There was only one bump in service: the hotel airporter was 12$ for the trip, which I wasn’t warned about (I had to borrow a quarter to make the fare).

My stay at the hotel was great. This was my first time in anything about a Holiday Inn / Best Western / Comfort Inn style of hotel and I had no idea what to expect for the 150-200$/night difference in price. I was pleasantly surprised here. Lots of pillows, very comfortable bed, lots of towels and even a full desk and lounge area.

I was very comfortable in my room.

The soap was fantastic, the shampoo sucked and the coffee was crap.

There were a lot of extra services available from the hotel, but these were all very high priced (10$ to wash a pair of pants, 25$ to dry clean it).

There was no wifi in the rooms, but there was wired broadband access. It was 8$/day though, which blew my mind. If you’re paying this much for a room, shouldn’t Internet be free?! C’mon…

Overall my stay was fantastic. I didn’t try room service because there were 100 restauarants in a 3 block radius.

Rating: 4.5/5

The only reason they lost the half star was because of the internet access and coffee. Physically I was very, very comfortable.