The Hotel at Midtown

This hotel is exceptional. We stayed during Chicago Marathon weekend and everything was awesome. Room was clean and elegant, beds were super comfortable and the entire property is simply breathtaking. Our room had an amazing view of downtown Chicago. It's very nice, would def stay here again!

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).