All About the San Diego W Hotel

The W San Diego offered an above average experience in curious surroundings. It's decor is painfully hip - though for the most part, it works. Guests walk into a long, two story room that doubles as a destination bar. On weekend nights, it thumps with night club music and is packed with groups of young beautiful people. This offers a strange first impression as a hotel guest, especially if you arrive late on a Friday, but aside from initial confusion (where do I check in?Where's the W hotel?), and feeling rather clunky with your rollerbag, the bar doesn't interfere with the guest experience. During the day, it offers oversized chess boards and tic-tac-toe games for those waiting for visiting groups to assemble. (However, when asked for some dice to play backgammon, the hotel staff could not locate any.) Also, don't miss the complimentary mango juice offered at the registration desk.A tasty morning treat.

Its location flirts with the fringes of the touristy sections of San Diego - a trip to the Gaslight district is a long, long walk. A trip to Balboa park is even longer. The only option for guest vehicles is a costly valet, but the service is excellent - we never had to wait longer than 2-5 minutes for our car. In fact, service at this hotel was excellent as a whole.

The room was comfortable - no expense was spared in the fixtures or the decorations, with the exception of a cheesy small hairdryer, but perhaps a hair dryer did not configure with the hotel's design theme. One particularly odd design choice was the stuffed beach ball that centered the bed - can't sleep on it, can't really throw it. And don't forget your jelly beans and condoms, because the odd but thoroughly amusing assortment of in-room extended mini-bar items were highly overpriced.

The gym and pool are both very small. The tiny pool seemed to be plunked into the middle of the hotel as an afterthought.The gym overlooks and shares space with the pool, which was awkward, but the machines and cardio equipment were both adequate.

Two other establishments, the (BAR) and the restaurant, RICE, were worth a trip on their own. The bar, BEACH, follows the style of the W San Diego, with a beach decor, replete with warmed sand and a faux-bonfire. Wicker hanging chairs are fun to sit in until your leg goes numb, or until you swing into a stranger, both of which likely happen more often late night on the weekends. The Ahi Tartare is excellent, if a bit strange in appearance.

RICE follows the hip decor found in the hotel. We ordered dessert and sat on some long benches of pillows, which were featured on the W website. They definitely looked cool, but offered inadequate back support, which had us flailing around to try to sit up for our dessert. The modern-version banana split, however, is worth all amounts of flailing.