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Last month, I went to Portland (Oregon) to catch a Bruce Springsteen show with a friend. Unfortunately, we planned a little late and the Hyatt Regency right by the arena was sold out, so we decided to stay at the Hyatt Centric. While downtown Portland is my least favorite part of the city (I much prefer the neighbourhoods), I had never been to the property before and the transit links to the show were quick and easy. The Boss rocked, but I can’t say that I’d be in a hurry to return to the hotel.
Hyatt Centric Portland Bottom Line Review
If you want to be downtown, the Hyatt Centric Portland is well-located and the interior design has plenty of style. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the positives ended for me. The overall service in the hotel was the worst that I’d experienced in some time. Quite literally, nothing went smoothly. The rooms are small, the fitness area is lackluster and the immediate neighbourhood is illustrative of how downtown Portland has struggled to regain its footing post-pandemic. It’s often a poor points-redemption value and in the end, I think that there’s better places to stay in the city. Rating: One thumb up, One thumb down
- Price: A Hyatt Category 3, 9K/12K/15K points off-peak/peak/standard. When I was there in February 2023, the night of a Bruce Springsteen show, it was $171/night for a Saturday night stay. The points price was 12K/night.
- Value: Most of the time, this is a marginal points redemption, usually between 1-1.5 cents per point in value.
- Location: It really depends on how you feel about downtown Portland. It’s right in the middle of things, near plenty of mass transit and within easy walking distance of the Pearl District and Chinatown. That said, the neighbourhood will remind you that downtown just hasn’t quite made it back post-pandemic. There’s quite a few boarded-up stores and you’ll have to dodge some tents on the sidewalks while you’re walking around.
- Room: The hotel was sold out, and we were upgraded to a 278 sq ft “West Hills View” room, which is simply a normal room on a high floor with an obstructed view of the West Hills.
- Parking: Valet parking is $47/night; there is no self-parking outside of local garages and the street.
- Resort/Destination Fee: None.
- Internet: Excellent, able to stream throughout the hotel.
- Service: Very poor. Check-in took almost twenty minutes because the front desk agent was unable to work the credit card machine. I had to park my own car in the valet garage and then walk with the valet to pick it up the next morning because none of the valets could drive a manual transmission. The restaurant service was terribly slow, even though there were only a couple of tables. We had to repeatedly ask for refills and boxes, to the point that I finally had to get a box from the kitchen myself. The food took almost 50 minutes to arrive and the order was wrong when we got it…although by that point we kept it as we were just glad to finally get something to eat.
- Turndown service: None.
- Dining:
- The Dining Room: Adjacent to the lobby, serving small menus for breakfast from 7:00-11:00am and for dinner from 4:00pm-10:00pm.
- Spa: None.
- Fitness Room:There is a very small fitness area near street level with a few cardio machines and a smattering of free weights.
- Hyatt Globalist Benefits:
- Suite Upgrade: I booked a standard city-view room and was upgraded to a West Hills View room on a high floor. Suites were sold out
- Free Breakfast: Served in the restaurant. It’s a limited menu, with 5-6 items. None of the food was great the morning that we were there and the service was terrible.
- Late Checkout: Automatically given 4pm.
- Parking: Valet parking is free on award stays. That said, none of the valets could drive a stickshift, so I had to park the car and get it out of the valet garage myself.
- Would I stay again? It wouldn’t be my first choice. It’s usually not a great points value and it just wasn’t a smooth-functioning property when I was there.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- If you want to be in downtown Portland, it’s a good location.
- The interior design is pretty stylish.
Cons
- Downtown Portland isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and the surrounding neighbourhood will show you why.
- Rooms are pretty small for Portland.
- Service – including check-in, restaurant and valet – was uniformly quite poor.
- No pool and a lackluster fitness area for those that want them.
Image Gallery
Hyatt Centric Portland Two Queen West Hills View
Hyatt Centric Portland Restaurant
Hyatt Centric Portland Fitness Area
Hyatt Centric Portland Common Areas
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Needed a crash pad for a couple of nights and it was a deal on points right up until I showed up. Eeks, this place is bad! There are lights underneath the beds and in the bathroom that are motion activated and not in working order so they kept coming on all night. Service was the same as in the review: terrible.
Hyatt House South Waterfront is a great hotel in the same price range and I should’ve scucked up the morning commute and stayed there instead.
We stayed here in late November 2022 for a 1-night getaway that was also kind of a mattress run (needed one more night for status). We really enjoyed it. We liked the decor and the spare/industrial vibe. When we walked back into the hotel from dinner at Toki (which was fun and delicious and just down the block), we decided we wanted a cookie and walked up to the grab and go area – they gave us two cookies for free. Presumably they were closing for the evening, but still a nice thing. We walked down 11th the next morning and had a great breakfast at The Daily Feast. We felt safe and saw zero homeless people. Really different experience from what is described in this review.
Short of being blind it is impossible to see zero homelessness people in the downtown Portland area if walking more than 100 yards. I mean at Toki you’re one block from the 13th, 405 frontage road, where hundreds of tents and their trash are laid out and most streets to the south of the Hyatt also have encampments.
I lived in the hotel for a few months (before moving to Portland). I think you might have gotten a bad week.
I had the service generally be pretty quick and exeptionally friendly.
Regarding the area I can confirm. The hotel is right on the edge of the not so fun part of downtown. Just 3 streets further down you have a little less issues. (My car got broken in twice in 3 months of street parking.
Nonetheless I still decided to move into a downtown apartment (with a garage) as Portland Pearl still has a nice unique combination of cool niche bars and exceptional food.
The demise of this great land begins in the inner cities. Portland, San Fran, LA, NY, Philly. I frankly don’t see the charm in staying at a great hotel on a street that’s in decay. I hope we can reverse this.
@Tim – You mention a couple of times that you prefer “the neighborhoods”. I’ve only been to Portland once for a visit last September, staying downtown. I can absolutely see the downsides of staying downtown but liked downtown overall. Which specific neighborhoods would you advise staying in?
Woodburn is lovely in the Spring and Summer, it is the Real Rose City.
Hey Ted…….
Love your beer, Sam
Mississippi Avenue, Albert Arts District, Hawthorne, and Sellwood are all eating and drinking areas for hipsters.
As a PDX Homer, I totally agree that downtown is a bit of a dump. It seems odd that there’s going to be Ritz Carlton in downtown Portland https://www.ritzcarlton.com/en/hotels/portland
The Ritz Carlton (i wish they left it a food cart pod) was planned for 9 years ago and now they looking for ways to unload the property. The new Hyatt at the convention center is also an epic business failure as Portland is no longer a desired business destination. The area around the convention center is very unsafe and highly disgusting.
For those who think Portland is a future MLB home. fuhgeddaboudit
I had the opposite experience staying in 2021. Service was excellent. The front desk staff referred to us by name whenever we passed by. They were extremely quick responding to requests. One constant is that points value was bad then too. I just paid cash.
Opinions of downtown Portland are almost always colored by broader biases. It’s not as bad as the critics would have you believe, nor as great as its fans say. My wife and I walked and used public transport and never felt unsafe. But there are a lot of closed businesses, and even fewer that operate in the evening. Visiting during the day (especially on a Saturday) and staying elsewhere will probably be preferable to most.
That’s a great example of trying to believe something and having blinders on to what everyone else sees. The only bias I see is one against reality and that’s you here
This review while interesting on its own is reflective of what we’ll potentially end up reading in other hotel reviews. The diminished opinion one has as a result of surrounding decay and squalor that has hit many of our urban areas.
I lived in the Sellwood-Moreland neighborhood for years and an adult child of mine still (for now) lives in the Pearl. The rot and decay in downtown Portland is a result of policy decisions that have led to rampant open-air drug use, uncontrolled crime and zero real efforts to do anything to clean the city up. Unless you think Portland underwent a different pandemic than the rest of the country, this is not a result of the pandemic.
It is sad – this was a beautiful city with a great culture that was displayed with tongue in cheek satire in Portlandia. The speed with which it went from a hipster utopia to a Blade Runner like dystopia, less than 10 years, is as sad as it terrifying.
This is a good article about the likely, impending death of Portland, though there are others in local publications. One of those even noted that Portlanders are afraid to go downtown now…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2021/01/28/death-of-a-city-the-portland-story/?sh=4e67f92374ad
I stayed there back in late September and found the place pretty bizarre. On paper I’m exactly Hyatt Centric’s type:
I don’t really use on-property services,I don’t usually linger in the lobby,I prefer to do my dining elsewhere,I’m big city trash so I want to be right smack in the central city,It’s just me and my wife so I’d take interesting design over space.Yet, I feel the Centric brand in general is quite confused and inconsistently applied from property to property.
Obviously taste is subjective, but the design is a firm con here to me. I’m fine with a more modern aesthetic, but there was just something uncannily uncomfortable about this place like the designer had never used a hotel room before: concrete floors and ceilings in a city that is chilly and drizzly often, a strange locker-room style curtained-off sink area, and the biggest design sin in a hotel – an echoey, barren toilet area closed off by a barn door with big gaps. Between that door and the concrete floor, it felt like using a public restroom.
I think you are being way too nice. Downtown Portland has turned into squalor. Used Needles, urine, feces on the streets and sidewalks. Property crime that has skyrocketed. Trash, tents cluttering the sidewalks. Panhandlers everywhere. Take off you’re rose covered glasses and give a correct portrayal so others are not misled. I previously lived in the Pacific NW and Portland OR was a beautiful clean city. Always in the top 10 of places people wanted to move to. No longer such and this has Nothing to do with the pandemic. The decline started long before that.
Thank a Californian. Your right, it started after the last recession ended and we were invaded by the wierdos, wackos, drug abusers and losers from the South.
As a stick shift car owner, I’m surprised the valets owned up to not being able to drive a stick. I have had way too many try to fake it
When I first went to Portland in the early nineties, downtown was rough. Then the Pearl District blossomed, a TV show called Portlandia happened, and everybody loved to love Portland. Then homelessness started happening and downtown just fell apart. It’s still a wonderful city….just can’t have rose colored glasses when you go. Mary’s is still there!!!
I lived there in the 80’s-2000’s, raised my kids there, one of whom is still in the Pearl, and go back regularly. To say downtown was rough is to misstate the facts. It was quiet and the city virtually closed down. That isn’t rough. It is dull.
But to compare this decline with boring is absurd. The city did come to life in 90’s and 00’s. In the last 10-15 years, though, policy decisions have taken the city so far off the rails, it may never recover.
The homeless apocalypse was present long before the pandemic. Weird that you would make an attribution to only a minor player in this city. Long time dead.
Friends don’t let friends go to Portland
Weird to write a whole article about the Hyatt Portland without specifying Oregon or Maine.
Was planning on booking this property for June due to the proximity to some of the breweries, what’s a better recommendation if you’re familiar with the area?