Westin NY at Times Square, New York City

I visited The Westin in October 2005 as a gift from my parents for my 21st birthday, they treated myself and my boyfriend to a 5 night stay in a superior room. I'll start by giving you some afcts about the hotel and then i'll give you my experience.

The Westin New York at Times Square is on the corner of 43rd Street and 8th Avenue, it has 863 rooms and 126 club rooms and suites. It has a restaurant (shula's steak house) a bar (bar ...
...take away (Cosi's). It has 24 hour room service, a gym and spa, a ticket desk and a gift shop.

My trip to the hotel:
On arrival to the hotel my first impressions were very good the hotel was an amazingly tall and colourful building, very very modern looking, we were greeted by really friendly porters who took our bags from us and then we made our way upstairs to the reception (the reception is on the 2nd floor - a little strange ... more

I visited The Westin in October 2005 as a gift from my parents for my 21st birthday, they treated myself and my boyfriend to a 5 night stay in a superior room. I'll start by giving you some afcts about the hotel and then i'll give you my experience.

The Westin New York at Times Square is on the corner of 43rd Street and 8th Avenue, it has 863 rooms and 126 club rooms and suites. It has a restaurant (shula's steak house) a bar (bar 10) and a coffee shop that does eat in and take away (Cosi's). It has 24 hour room service, a gym and spa, a ticket desk and a gift shop.

My trip to the hotel:
On arrival to the hotel my first impressions were very good the hotel was an amazingly tall and colourful building, very very modern looking, we were greeted by really friendly porters who took our bags from us and then we made our way upstairs to the reception (the reception is on the 2nd floor - a little strange i thought!)

The staff at the reception didn't seem particuarly friendly - i put this down to the fact that i'd just got off a 7 hour flight and maybe i was a bit grumpy but through the course of the week i came to realise this wasn't the case, I was given all the relevant documentation and told which lifts took us to our room, and given directions to the lift.

The lifts are a little confusing because some of them do not go all the way up to the top they stop at around the 30th floor, fine if your on those floors, but i was on the 42nd so i had to remember to get in the correct lift (got that wrong a few times too!) The lifts are extremly fast a made me feel a little queezy - i was glad when people got in and out half way to slow it down a little!

We had a little trouble getting our room door open but we seem to have problems with those key cards everywhere we go, although we did get used to it after a few tries!

The room was fantastic, on the right as you walk in there was a very big mirrored wardrobe with sliding doors and a good supply of hangers. It had a large amount of hanging space and a space at the top for folded clothes, also in there was an iron and ironing board (not that i used them once!) a coffee machine which was free a large mini bar which was very expensive and laser aligned so if you move anything it charges you regardless of whether you actually take it out of not and at around £15 for a tiny pot of nuts we didn't dare open the door! And a small but very useful safe, it was just big enough to fit in our passports spare money and boxes for the jewellery that we purchased when we were out there (you gotta love Tiffany & Co).

On the left was a frosted glass sliding door which led to a spacious and ultra-modern bathroom, it was all matt black tile's with a few glittery grey tiles around, a chrome sink and toilet and white towels, the towels were huge and very soft, we also got bathrobes and slippers although i'm not sure if you get these in a standard room. The bath is sunk slightly into the floor and so looks tiny however when i got in it was huge! There was a huge chrome shower with not one very large shower head but two!!! why i'm not sure but it felt good! There was a good supply of toileties, however they wern't repenished very often, we used all the bath bubbles on the first day and didn't get anymore for 2 days.

Directly infront of the entrance was the bedroom, it was a very big room with stone coloured walls, very tastfully decorated and inkeeping with the rest of the hotel very modern. The bed was probably the biggest bed i have ever slept in, with so many sheets and quilts, most definatly without a doubt the most comfortable hotel bed i have ever slept in and it had a very tall brown leather headboard, next to the bed each size was a bedside table which had a small drawer and a lamp on, opposite the bed was a giant TV bigger than all my TV's at home put together! Attached to the TV was a controller for a nintendo 64, for which you order games through the TV in the same way you order movies. The TV was on a big desk that had an office chair with it, space to plug in your laptop and have access to wireless internet, and a chest of drawers, in the bottom drawer there was a selection of local phone books and a bible. There was a phone on one of the bed side tables and one on the desk along with a list of charges, which was very unclear. We used the phone only a few times to call home and all we did was ask my parents to call us back and put the phone down, so you can imagine our shock when we were presented with a £500 phone bill at the end of the week, when i went down to check this out i was given an itemised bill, basically what they do is as soon as you dial a number they start charging you, they charge all the time your dialling and all the time it takes to connect, then when it connects they charge a hefty connection fee and charge per minute after that, sometimes i'd been charged £15 for dialling 4 numbers then putting it down because i'd realised that i had dialled the wrong number, my advice go down to the lobby use the pay phone - thats what i'll be doing next time! They did remove these charges when i asked them to, so although i was annoyed about getting a bill like that in the first place it wasn't a problem to get it sorted out, but again the staff at reception were a little rude.

In the corner of the room on the right of the bed was space to tuck suitcases out of the way and a bench that you could put room service trays on, in the other corner was a large orange arm chair which was perfectly placed for looking out at the fantastic view.

The view from the room was amazing we were on the 42nd floor so it was a long way up and we could see down on to a lot of roofs. The Paramount building was at the opposite end of the block and we could see through to Times Square, slightly to the rigt of our hotel was the Empire State building, it was around 10 blocks away but looked an awful lot closer!

There were cards in both the bathroom and the bedroom which was part of an environmental thing the hotel does, if you want your bed changed you but the card on it, if not they'll leave it until you do, and the same in the bathroom with the towels.

We got a free copy of USA Today delivered outside the door eveyday.

All in all the room was very spacious, clean and comfortable and even more luxurious than i expected.

As for the rest of the hotel, my boyfriend used the gym once he said it was very small and the equipment was fairly basic although he said it had everything he needed , you have to pay to extra use the gym, its around £10 a day or you can pay £30 for a week, there's also a sauna and treatment room there, we didn't use those so i can't comment on the quality of them although there was a treatment menu in my room and they seemed a little pricey (around £65 for a 50 minute facial)!

Bar 10 is a really nice bar within the hotel, you have the option to pay for your drinks there and then or you can charge them to your room. Its a really trendy bar with a beautiful fire place in the middle and barstools that look out of the window, drinks prices were ok we paid around £15 for 2 vodka lemonade and limes, and with your first order you are given a selection of nuts crisps and pretzles. There is also a good selection of bar snacks available, we didn't eat in here but i saw the man next to me's food and his looked delicious! On our first visit to the bar we did wonder about the dress code everyone looked so glam and the men were all in suits, and there was us in combats and timberlands, but we asked the barman and he couldn't have made us feel more welcome, he said we looked fab and took us to a seat near the window. The bar staff were great and when they had a quiet spell they'd walk round the bar and chat to us and other guests which was such a nice touch.

Shula's steak house is the hotel restaurant, its very tastfully decorated with lots of baseball memorabilia on the walls, we visited this restaurant for breakfast and it was very high quality and the sevice was excellent, i did feel it was a little expensive we had 2 orange juices a pot of tea, a ham and cheese omlet and home style potatoes and bacon 2 fried eggs and home style potatoes and it was almost £60.

The hotel has its own ticketing desk where you can buy tickets for broadway shows sporting events, cinema's ect, the desk is a really good idea but its tucked out of the way round a corner and i didn't even realise it was there until our 2nd to last day in the hotel.

The porters in the hotel were fantastic they were so polite and helpful and they would do anything for you from getting you transport to giving you directions, even down to just chatting to you when your in the queue for a cab on a rainy day!

The hotel is at 270 west 43rd street on the corner of 8th avenue and if you look on a map of the city you can see what a great place it is to stay in, it was perfect it took less than a minute to walk straight into the heart of time square, and the same in the other direction to get to the port authority bus terminal and more than one subway station. There was a convinience store across the street which sold everything.

The room that i had was around £200 a night, although they do have cheaper and more expensive rooms and suites avaliable, they also do a lot of packages where you get the room and theatre tickets, they have spa rooms where you get the room and some in room treatments, and workout rooms where you get gym equipment in the room, there are prices for all of these on the hotel's website but unusually i found you get a better deal if you book through an agent rather than directly.

Afreind of mine had some chocolates sent to my room as a birthday present, and whilst i can't comment on value for money of them i can say they were absolutly DELICIOUS!!!!!

All in all my stay in this hotel was fantastic, the miserable reception staff did not put me off at all. The hotel was so luxurious and the rest of the staff were so friendly, the location was perfect and i couldn't have wished for a better 21st birthday, thats why i've already booked to go back next September, i really enjoyed New York its a fabolous city and i plan on going back at least once a year and i can't imagine staying at any other hotel, i would highly reccomend this hotel to anyone that wants a little luxury and somewhere to relax after a hard days shopping! 

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