I stayed at Grand Victoria, with a comped room, so there were no complaints about the room-rate. While the overall experience at the hotel was OK, it was certainly nothing outstanding. I believe that it is no longer being managed by Hyatt Hotels, and the change seems to have resulted in a distinct lessening of standards.
The room was an average room, similar to what would be found at a Holiday Inn or Comfort Inn. Everything seemed clean enough. The furnishings consisted of bed, good-sized couch and small table with chairs.The television was an older tube model (no flat-screens here). The bed was reasonably comfortable, but, as many hotels do, the sheets are all of the tuck-in variety (no fitted bottom sheet), and they tend to come untucked during the night. You may find yourself rolling around on the bare mattress, which is not always the nicest surface to imagine oneself in contact with.
The hotel still uses the standard heavy bedspread, rather than a removable duvet, as is seen in many upscale hotels. After all of the publicity about the various, unsavory types of contamination that can linger, unseen, on a hotel bedspread, it would seem that management might want to rethink that type of bedding.
The highlight (lowlight, actually) had to be the uniformly robotic hotel staff. Upon checkin, I casually asked if the front desk might be offering any type of coupons or funbooks, and received a somber "No!" and a look as if I had asked about arranging a tour of the outer planets. Now that might be understandable, except for the fact that Grand Victoria IS attached to a riverboat casino, and the use of coupon and funbook promotions is hardly unusual at casino hotels. Guess the staff here is not familiar with that concept.
Every staff member who was passed in the hallway had their eyes averted, and pretty much looked like they would rather be anywhere but at work. The check-out at the Front Desk was, however, one of the quickest check-outs ever experienced. The clerk glanced at her records, and stated "You-don't-owe-anything-have-a-good-day", and managed to do it without ever looking up from the counter. Not sure if she would have known that I was standing there, if I hadn't mentioned that I was checking out of the room. Best theory is that management must make all of the staff come in before shift, and chow down on the cold, hard leftovers from the previous day's buffet, and then use sour grapefruit juice to gargle with. Maybe they are just minimum wage hotel workers, but they do still have a job, which is nothing to take for granted, in today's economy.
Not sure if I would want to stay here again. The casino was about average, no big wins, no big losses, but I will say that the machines gave a lot of play on money that was recycled in and out of various Slots and 3-card Poker machines. However I have a feeling that the Grand Vic is going to have some serious problems, with the recent opening of the huge, brand-new Hollywood Casino, just a few miles up the road in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. When you have an older casino that is somewhat smokey, and not really all that big, coupled with hotel staff that feel they are doing the customers a favor simply by being there, it is not a likely formula for garnering any repeat business.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC
