I can't even begin to describe the horrible experience that my husband and I had with this hotel when we stayed here on our wedding night. We got married on July 16, 2011, in San Juan Capistrano at a beautiful country club. Half of our guests stayed at the Dana Marina Inn in the Dana Point Harbor and the other half stayed at the Hills Hotel in Laguna Hills.
After our wedding night was over, my husband and I were "wisked away" in our hummer limo to our "honeymoon suite" at the Hills. We were so excited but very tired as well. When we arrived at the hotel at 2:30am ( I in my wedding gown and my husband in his suit), no one from the hotel even acknowledged us or helped us bring in any luggage from our car that had been parked at the hotel. We had to carry in all the luggage ourselves -- not exactly romantic.
Now that we had gotten our luggage ourselves, my husband and I entered the lobby and approached the front desk to check in to our room. Once again, even though there were two individuals standing behind the desk working on the computer, they were very rude. We didn't even get a single "hello" or "congratulations". Is this how you treat your guests? Even a simple "We'll be with you in a minute" would have suited me just fine. Instead, we were completely ignored for a good 10 minutes or so.
We were finally assisted by the men at the front desk. They gave us two key cards and we headed up to our room with our luggage in tow. At this point, I was so ready to get into our room and get some sleep, as we had a brunch to attend the next morning. To our dismay, when we slid our key cards into the door, we weren't seeing any green flashing lights that would give us access to our room. Instead, all we saw was bright red. Our room keys weren't activated! At first we thought this was a fluke and that it had just happened to us. However, when my husband went back down to the lobby to resolve this issue, it appeared that a couple other wedding guests of ours were experiencing the same issues. I was so embarrassed that my guests also had to deal with the hotel's incompetence.
Later on, my husband and I came to find that the hotel didn't even have a room for us in their system. In fact, when a friend of ours went over to the hotel 2 hours before our arrival to decorate our room with rose petals, and candles, there was no record of our room in the Hills' database. The room that they did put us in was definitely NOT newly remodeled and NOT a honeymoon suite by any means!! Instead, the hotel stuck us in whatever room they had available. Had our friend not gone to the hotel prior to us getting there, my husband and I would not have had a room on our wedding night.
Any other night, I might have let these little things slide, but the fact that I was a newlywed anticipating that romantic night in my "honeymoon suite" with my husband, kind of changed things a bit. I hope this hotel will not treat other newleyweds the way that we were treated. They definitely put a damper on my first night as a married woman.