Guest Author - Nicole James

This past weekend was spent at the Embassy Suites, in the San Diego Bay location. I will first admit that this was not a family vacation, but one with my significant other. Regardless, I thought that since I was there, I would take a look around and see how it would work for families.

This hotel is right at the bay, and if you have a bayside room, you will have unbelievable views. The rooms look over the bay, Point Loma, as well as the Aircraft Carrier Midway. The Midway is a great place to visit with kids, especially school-aged kids. The hotel is also next to Seaport Village, and is a very short walk from Horton Plaza and the Gaslamp District.

Embassy Suites is a great hotel chain, in my family-centric opinion. I love the large rooms, in that they are all suites. You have a bedroom area, and a sitting area with pull-out sofa, a table, desk, chairs, etc. Both rooms have televisions, so that children can watch what they want in one room, while you watch something different in the bedroom. The televisions were rather old though, and were not the fancy plasma LCD flat-screen TV’s that I have become accustomed to in hotels. (Editor’s Disclosure: I do not have a flat screen at home! I am too cheap to replace a perfectly good old fashioned tube television.) The televisions had the normal hotel stations, with ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, as well as Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney Channel. For the grownups, they had Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the History Channel. The hotel also offered movies on demand, as well as Video Games on demand. The video games on demand we very expensive.

One of the absolute pluses of staying at any Embassy Suites hotel is the free breakfast & afternoon cocktail manager’s reception. The free breakfast is a cooked to order breakfast, and not some boring continental breakfast of cold stale danishes and weak coffee. They have an eggs and omelet station, as well as everything else you can possibly imagine. I had a Western Omelet, home fries, bacon, and about 5 glasses of orange juice. (The juice glasses were tiny, about twice the size of a shot glass, no lie!). My partner also had an omelet, as well as a ton of bacon and sausage. We had breakfast around 9:00am, and we didn’t have to wait in a long line, which was something I was worried about. However, it did take about 5 minutes to locate an empty table for us to sit at.

The hotel does seem like a business hotel, in that I didn’t see too much that would thrill my children. No game room, and the pool is an indoor pool, of a rather small size. It had a very Eastern European bath house feel, which is odd when you are in San Diego, and it is 78 degrees outside and sunny. However, to be honest, where the hotel is located, there is so much to do with your kids, that you wouldn’t really need to use the pool. It is perfect for a weekend away, but for a longer stay, I would definitely want an outdoor swimming pool, as that is usually my kids first and favorite request. In addition, you are required to pay for parking, and it is $24 per day. It is valet, and you can come and go as often as you want for that $24, but still, it is an added expense nonetheless.

In closing, the hotel was fantastic, and we had a great stay there. The employees were all incredibly nice and helpful, and the concierge was as knowledgeable as they come. When stuck without a dinner reservation on a Saturday night, the concierge got us an 8:30 reservation at a top seafood restaurant just a few blocks away. She was even off-duty, but helped us anyway. When she called the restaurant, she knew the name of the hostess, and it was obvious she knew what she was doing.

If you have children, San Diego is a wonderful place to visit. The Embassy Suites Downtown would be a great place to stay for a weekend, as they have great free breakfasts and the rooms are second to none. Just be prepared for a lack of kid-friendly amenities, and the disappointing indoor pool.


USS Midway Museum : http://www.midway.org/
Embassy Suites Downtown San Diego Bay : http://embassysuites1.hilton.com/en_US/es/hotel/SANDNES-Embassy-Suites-San-Diego-Bay-Downtown-California/index.do