After doing media coverage of the Travel & Adventure Show, I walked to the Sheraton Grand Los Angeles hotel, where I would stay for that night. The hotel is located at 711 South Hope Street, about a mile from the Los Angeles Convention Center & Crypto Arena. It is located in the heart of the financial district of downtown, next to the 7th street/Metro Center LA Metro station. It is part of the Bloc shopping center, which is home to the west coast flagship store of Macy’s, along with several local restaurants, a movie theater, and more.
The Sheraton is rated by the American Automobile Association with three diamonds for its comprehensive amenities, style, and comfort levels. It has five food & beverage outlets: the District sit-down restaurant & bar; lobby bar at the Hope Street Bar; grab a quick bite at the Hope Street Market next to the lobby bar; the Club Lounge if you bought in for the club access rooms or are a Marriott Bonvoy rewards member of Platinum or above, and lastly room service can be delivered to your guest room for a delivery fee & upcharge of food prices. The Sheraton has over 26,000 sq ft of event space on the lower levels and can accommodate most events and smaller conferences, and you can also have your events in outdoor spaces on fair weather days. It contains 456 guest rooms & suites, ranging from a standard king room to a one-bedroom suite.
All guestrooms have mini-fridges, microwaves upon request, coffee makers, complimentary bottles of water, a desk with desk chair, a lounge chair in one king room or a sitting chair in the two queen rooms, and 47 inch TV. All bathrooms are lined with marble, have a bathtub/shower combo, and have large bottles for the bathroom amenities in a woodsy scent. For an upgrade fee for city view or club lounge access rooms. The fitness center and the club lounge are on the 26th floor with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles.
If you come to downtown Los Angeles, it is dense and confusing to navigate. If you can, take public transportation into the area via Metrolink & Amtrak to Los Angeles Union Station, then take the LA Metro red or purple lines subway to 7th Street/Metro Center. The stop is for the LA Metro B red & D purple subway lines and the terminus light rail lines A Blue to Long Beach & Expo E to North Hollywood. Just be aware of the many homeless people sleeping on the train and the excessive smell of pee at the stations. To lessen contact at the ticketing machine, download the LA Metro Tap app, buy a virtual card, and use the phone or smart watch RFID to tap to accept the fare at the fare gate. If you take Metrolink, they have included a transfer transit pass for most transit agencies for the first or last portion of your trip.
The Sheraton is 30 miles from Anaheim via car. If there is no traffic, it takes about 30 minutes when it is all clear on a weekend morning like I did, or forever and a day at any other time, especially on the weekdays. The highways have always jammed due to the maze of freeways and drivers needing to merge on and exit the freeway. I drove in since the Amtrak train would not be there in time as it departs at 8:10 am and arrives at 9 am, then takes a bus or light rail to the convention center, about thirty minutes, cutting it a bit close. However, with all of my luggage and camera gear, it was easier to drive in via car. I would take the freeways of I-5, wrap around to the west side of downtown on Highway 101 and I-110, and exit at Wilshire Blvd. Parking for hotel valet costs $54 per night, however, valet only has clearance on the valet garage for 6 ft. Since my Jeep had a roof rack on top, it was on the edge of 6ft and was refused by the valet staff. Otherwise, there is self-parking at the Bloc parking garage for $45 per 24-hour period + any additional time since when you pull into the garage, granted you don’t need in-and-out access to the garage with 6ft 6 in clearance, which is fine for my car.
The front desk is in the lobby on the street level, the Sheraton was sold out the night before and I had to wait to get a notification on the Marriott Bonvoy app that the room was ready. When I was at the Travel & Adventure Show at the Los Angeles Convention Center, at 3:30 pm, I got the notification that the room was ready. When I came back to the hotel at 5 pm, I got my suitcase from the back of the Jeep and went to the front desk, where you had to go back out from the Bloc garage, and back on to Hope Street’s main entrance since the Bloc entrance is keyed access.
At the front desk, I got checked in and submitted my Marriott employee discount form, called the Explore Rate, if there is lower occupancy of 80% or less at the time of booking, employees get a special discount of $79 + tax + tourism fees + amenity fees if applicable, more on that later. If above 80% occupancy, is the friends & family rate, which is slightly discounted off the best available rate from Marriott. The employee can get two explore room rates at once, direct family members like parents & siblings can get one to explore rate at a time, and everyone else gets the friends & family rate. The employee is responsible for giving friends & family members the form with that person’s name and informing the person about the policy.
I did online mobile check-in, which allows the front desk to authorize the card on file for preauthorization, and get a notification via text or on the Marriott app that the room is ready, which was at 3:30 pm. I also needed to then in the Explore form before I could get my keys, which optimally, should be printed and ready to be handed a check-in. They authorized my credit card on file for room + tax + tourism fees + incidental hold of $50 per night + $25 destination/amenity/resort fee. What is that fee?
Destination/amenity/resort fees or whatever else they are called are fees that hotels tack on as a tax dodge since it is hard for governments to tax fees that hotels don’t typically do for room and tax, per Pauline Frommer, the executive director of Frommer Travel Guides, who I interviewed earlier that day. The fee ”includes” amenities that are either not covered by room & tax or extras that are not covered. If it covers extras, such as the return of the amount in food & beverage credit, high-speed wi-fi, fitness classes, tickets to museums, and more, like the Sheraton Grand, as long as you don’t use any of the listed amenities fees, you can dispute it. However, the earlier “cover” the usage of everything but the room, such as the pool, fitness center, wifi, and parking like at Tenaya Lodge, a resort outside of Yosemite National Park with a $30 amenity fee, which was the case back when I did my front desk internship there during the summer of 2018. It was hard to dispute with management as parking is a part of it as most guests drove in since the resort is in the middle of the Sierra Nevada mountains. More on that on a hotel fee piece I am working on.
The Sheraton Grand Los Angeles fee per night of $25 has: high-speed wifi at 40 megabits per second, $25 food & beverage credit, morning yoga classes for two, two Grammy Museum tickets per stay, daily popcorn at the gift shop which was out when I got there at 5 pm, two day passes to the Gold’s Gym that is located two blocks away at the Figat7th shopping center, and Marriott Gold & above members get free chips at the District, wow such value with chips (sarcasm at the last one)! I did not dispute the amenity fee as the restaurant looked good, I needed the high speed to work on my videos, and since I drove in, I had time to go to the Grammy Museum. I woke up at sunrise but not even close to being ready for the yoga, and I just needed to use the fitness center elliptical so the Gold’s Gym was not necessary as it is more for bodybuilding. While checking in, the guest services did not seem to take disputes lightly as I overheard guests dispute about the fee and were not successful, so I decided to bite the fee since it had good perks anyway.
The wifi was fast at 40 megabits per second and I was able to upload footage from the Travel & Adventure Show to the Google Photos cloud in no time. After I checked out the next day, I got the tickets from guest services and went to the Grammy Museum, more on that in a separate post.
For dinner that night to spend my f&b credit, I went to the hotel’s restaurant, the District. The District is the full-service sit-down restaurant & bar of the hotel, which sources ingredients locally from the SoCal region farms. Since I was there myself, I sat at the bar and waited a while, while the bartenders frantically worked on guests’ orders before they got to me. I watched them prep their unique drinks such as the Picture This where they top a bourbon with egg whites and use a Ripple machine to do a custom picture on the egg white foam, an old-fashioned rye bourbon with wood fire smoke, and one other cocktail that gets a long burn time with a blowtorch but I could not tell which it was. Due to their wood smoke and fire for the drinks, the restaurant had the smell of firewood, which stuck on my jacket for the rest of the night but faded away the next day. They got to me about ten minutes later, which was fine with me since I was entertained by the bartenders making the drinks. Then I finally got a menu as there wasn’t a QR code at all, I also found it on their website as well before the bartenders got to me.
Since I had a salmon salad for lunch, I wanted to get a burger & fries. I got the Cali Burger, a patty melt-style burger on toasted bread with avocado, chipotle mayo, pepper jack cheese, poblano pepper, and sweet onions. For drinks, I got an LA-based brewery, Golden Road’s Wolf Pup India Pale Ale (IPA) at 4.5% ABV, which is much lighter in alcohol for an IPA, usually 6% or above. As the name implies, it is the pup version of the Big Hazy Wolf Hazy Double IPA at 9% ABV. I got a glass of water to keep me hydrated.
The burger & the beer were really good, with the tip being $33.08 – $25 F&B credit from the amenity fee = $8.08, however, that is not how it is billed. My main receipt has the $33.08, then on a separate receipt, my credit card was billed back $25 for the credit for each day that I use the F&B credit, and then shifted over to my main receipt when I checked out. That is a lot of work that guest service needs to deal with, these hotel fees are too much to work with just for the “extra revenue”…
After dinner, I went back up to my guestroom and worked on this script more, even though, I was still tired from going around the Travel & Adventure Show. However, there was a glaring issue with the structure of the building, I can hear the water running from neighboring rooms all night. I told the front desk about it and they said it is an ongoing issue and the water lines will be fixed in the coming months. According to Kay Plumbing, these are worn-out pipelines and fittings. I did eventually fall asleep.
The next day, I ate the trail mix pack and a granola bar to save money on breakfast to splurge on lunch and then went to work out at the 26th-floor fitness center. However, getting there is not a quick feat as there are only four elevator shafts for twenty-six floors, as it took me six minutes when I checked out the fitness center the night before. The Sheraton and the adjacent office towers are generic rectangular towers, except for the 26th floor of the Sheraton as it is circular and much smaller than the rest of the tower. The 26th floor hosts the club lounge on one half for Marriott Bonvoy Rewards Platnum & above and club-level guests, and then the fitness center on the other half of the circle. The fitness center has the typical treadmills, ellipticals, stationary bikes, strength machines, weights, water machines, and restrooms, all with sweeping views of the downtown Los Angeles skyline towards the south. I was on the elliptical for fifty minutes while listening to a TV show on my phone with my earbuds on with the high-speed wifi.
After showering, I packed up and headed to the desk to check out. While checking out I got the finalized copy of my receipt, which is $128.37 with the destination amenity fee F&B credit. I also got a voucher for the Grammy Museum from guest services as well. Then I headed to the Bloc garage where I parked my car to drop off my luggage in the back of the car.
Then I took the light rail from 7th Street Metro Center station to the next stop, Pico, to ride the right rail. About two hours later after getting lunch at Smashburger and the Grammy Museum at the L.A. Live Complex (more on that in the next post), I paid $50 for parking, just a bit less than the $53+tax for the hotel valet.
Since downtown Los Angeles is a confusing downtown grid, my phone’s GPS helped me get out of the area, however, there was so much congestion on I-5, I took CA 90 to Pomona, then CA 57 South to Anaheim. I’ll try to take the train next time, I hate driving!!!
The Sheraton Grand Los Angeles is a great hotel with a renovated upscale style, in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, conveniently located at the LA Metro stops. All the food & beverage outlets are great, with many local options nearby. The fitness center works well for most guests, probably why Gold’s Gym is part of the fee as an option for more body-building workouts. However, with the downtown location, driving in a large vehicle is not recommended with the limited height of the valet garage of 6 ft and the 6 ft 4 in height limit of the Bloc garage to self-park, which there isn’t any in and out access due to that. If you can, take public transportation or a taxi into town. Lastly, the destination fee is annoying, but it is hard to fight as I overheard guests question it and guest services not letting guests fairly fight off the fee.
