The Hotel at Midtown

People might say this hotel has a nice gym but I say this nice gym has a hotel! This hotel has the most impressive gym I've ever seen. When you stay at the hotel, you get to use the facilities. The gym is so nicely decorated. I noticed a lot of people would come to the gym, hang out, work on their laptop and then use the gym. There is even a golf simulator - two of them actually! The walls in the hotel room are a bit thin, as you can hear weights dropping and group classes, but the attentive staff provides earplugs to mitigate the noise. The room is spacious with a well-thought-out layout. Overall, a great experience for fitness enthusiasts.

I stayed here for 4 nights Aug 2023. The hotel and gym are in the same building with the entrance and elevators and very crowded with people coming to work out at all hours of the day and evenings. The whole building smells like sweat. The outdoor poor was highly crowded and full of kids to the extent that the water appeared cloudy. Each time I tried to swim (including early morning and end of the day when it was “adult time” I kept getting strands of hair wrapped around my fingers. It is the dirtiest pool I have ever personally experienced. The room itself was nice, no complaints. Staff interactions were either great or awful. On the day that I was checking out I had called downstairs requesting a late checkout because of being on a work call 11am-12pm (checkout time is 11am but can be extended to 2pm). After this I had 2 maids come into the room and 4 calls from the reception desk all during my 1hr Zoom work call to ask me when I was checking out. When I complained about the 6 interruptions, the front desk guy tells me over the phone verbatim “We are trying to run a business.” It was so incredibly inappropriate I could not wait to get my things and check out. What an awful way to end what was a mediocre stay at best. This place is trying to do it all, be a gym, a hotel, be cool and trendy but really the experience is like being away at an overnight camp at a crowded smelly gym with a disgusting pool and a mixture of pleasant and rude staff members.

We had a great stay. The staff at the front desk were warm and accommodating. David learned our name at check-in and had us feeling important every time we passed through. It cannot be overstated how incredible the athletic facilities are - first class. It is an unusual setup but it worked out great for us. We exercised everyday and enjoyed the eucalyptus sauna. The area has an adjacent grocery, and the hotel is right on road with a bike path that got us (on scooters) all over the city.

For people like excercising, it is a great place. During the one-day stay, me and my gf had a great lunch, and then in the afternnon we played a lot in its indoor tennis court & worked out at its 2nd floor. Then, i took a hot water shower and sauna. Also, the location is very good. It is 15mins to the chinatown, and 22mins to the japan market.

If you are considering staying at this hotel based on the nice room photos featured on their website and the higher-tier room rates they charge (as we were), be forewarned that these photos do NOT nearly represent the full (and very disappointing) hotel experience that you would expect at this price point– as we found out when we stayed there. Start with the hotel entrance. From their website, you’d probably envision a nice, pull-up-to-the-curb entrance with plenty of area to unload your vehicle and helpful staff there to assist you. In reality, you’re looking for a non-descript, concrete, 5-story parking ramp in the parking lot of a plot of land containing a Michael’s Crafts, a Home Depot, and a few other businesses. Find your way deep into the back corner of the ramp and you’ll find a set of revolving doors. This is the hotel entrance. Once inside, there’s no grand lobby with hotel staff there to meet you. Instead, you’re suddenty thrust into a high-traffic corridor fighting health club members coming and going from their daily workouts. After you frogger your way through them, you’ll finally make your first contact with a member of the hotel staff. After checking in, they’ll buzz you through the health club turnstiles and send you on your way to your room. The room was okay. The photos are accurate. They’ve even included a refrigerator– albeit a very small, square, dorm-style refrigerator that doesn't even include a freezer compartment. We honestly didn’t know they made microwave ovens as small as the one they had in our room. It was literally pop-tart sized. You could fit a bag of microwave popcorn in it pre-popping, but I’m not sure if you would be able to remove the bag post-popping without applying major effort. The bathroom is stylish, as long as you don’t mind water covering the entire floor of your bathroom after taking a shower. It’s one of those modern bathrooms where you don’t have a drain under the shower. Instead you have a slit in the floor that the water is supposed to run into. The trouble is it doesn’t– not without using your bare feet to direct the water towards it or bunch some towels up into a makeshift squeegee. When we described the problem to the staff, they said they could send someone up to fix the drainage issue– except that it wasn’t a drainage issue– it was a water not going towards the drain issue. So be ready for a wet bathroom floor experience. Also, you should know you’ll be hearing all sort of bumping and kicking noises from the floors above you (fortunately only during the daytime hours). Asked about this, they did point that the fine print of their website states we should expect this while staying here. We didn’t notice this until after the fact. You probably ought to know about it beforehand. The health club that is part of this hotel was very nice. However, I think that sentence should probably be flipped around. The health club is the priority here, and the hotel is actually an afterthought– an area of rooms that offers convenient location to the health club– and very little else. As testament to how little priority the hotel holds in this building, when I asked if they provide courtesy transportation (van or bus) to and from nearby Wrigley Field for Cubs games, the desk clerk wasn't even sure offhand– and had to go back and find out from someone else (with the answer clearly being no).