Description: 51 Buckingham is a fine place to stay with an excellent location. Having said that, this isn't 5 star accomodation. They offered a lot in theory, but the reality didn't pan out well.
Physically, it is very pretty, but from a practical view, the furniture in our one bedroom suite offered very little storage for clothes. We travel pretty lightly and the closet was an ok size, but we had to immediately request more than seven hangers provided. The "dresser" in the bedroom was an old entertainment center that had four thin shelves obviously intended for DVD players, etc which we ended up using for our clothes and an enormous space that could fit a television where we stored our suitcases. That was literally all that was provided for clothes storage. The vanity would have been more functional if it had a light as that area of the room was pretty dark so it just ended up being in the way.
When we arrived, there was a nice gift basket with fruit, cookies, tea etc. wrapped in celophane. We had been using these items and storing them in the wicker basket in which they were presented. On our fouth day the things were dumnped on the counter and the basket was gone. Clearly we were using the basket so this just seemed kind of cheesy. I mean, had it disappeared the first day I probably wouldn't have given it a thought, but this makes me think they needed it for another room. Another day all of our detergents and paper towel disappeared. Another day we inexplicably received a mini bar charge for a bottle of white wine and a can of soda that we didn't use.
The powder room (yup, it had a bath and a half) was a nice touch but the sink completely blocked the door opening so you had to kind of wedge your way in sideways and if we were large people, we wouldn't have used it at all. This area probably would have been of more service as a closet.
The kitchen had an oven, dish washer and clothes washer/drier that were ultimately very helpful, but four staff members were sent up before one of them could figure out how the appliances function. A simple "how to" sheet would have been such a time saver for all of us.
I am a 50 year old woman and not particularly menacing looking, but for some reason, on our sixth day, a security guard followed me into the lobby insisting I show him my key, which was a little embarrassing as there were several other people in the lobby at the time. First, he could have casually kept an eye on me to make sure I entered a room using a key so that I wouldn't be aware of his concerns and secondly, this isn't a huge place -- I expect security people, especially, to be observant enough to recognize a guest who had been there for the past week.
I think it would be helpful if the housekeeping staff had some indoctrination about how to deal with people's personal items. In my experience maids work around where guests keep there toiletries or all of the maids in a hotel have a standard manner to lay out everyone's things. At 51 Buckingham it was anyone's guess where I would find my toothbrush everyday and one day one of the cleaning staff layed out things that I had stored in my travel kit. It was like having an annoying roomate.
On the other hand, some actions seemed robotic. For example, every day the maid put bottles of water on the nightstands even though the previous days bottles weren't used so by the end of the stay we had over a dozen sitting there.
As I was checking the room when we were leaving, I found someone else's plane ticket paperwork, shoe trees and an orange behind the drapes so maybe it could have been cleaner.
Finally, part of our package included transportation to the train station on our last day. The front desk person had a rather loud argument with the taxi driver in front of us regarding the fare which was a bit uncomfortable. The cabbie's estimate was very nearly perfect, by the way.
By themselves each of these incidents were minor, but as a whole, exhausting.
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