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Highlights

• Alcatraz
• Biking the Golden Gate Bridge
• Visiting with my brother in law
• Covered Wagon tours
• Everything in Long Beach

Lowlights

• Desert Springs Resort

What Went Right?

• Flights went smoothly

• Hotels were in excellent locations and good choices (with one exception)
• Rooms were large enough to keep the boys from fighting (most of the time)
• Never a dull moment. We always had options for things to do
• Regular trips to the gym had us feeling more healthy by the end of the trip
• The right balance of activities and relaxation for such a long trip
• The rental car was nice and went smoothly

Takeaways

At 16+ days, this was the most extended trip we’d been on so far. While it wasn’t the international Asian tour we had initially been looking at, we were pleased with our decision to hit some California highlights. In hindsight, with the unrest in Hong Kong and the flu epidemic, it’s probably best we didn’t do that version fo the trip anyways.

We got lucky in San Francisco with a fantastic hotel in an excellent location for a very inexpensive rate. The boys enjoyed one of my favorite cities. In San Diego, we had a relaxing stay with my brother in law over Christmas. We experienced new things in Palm Springs, including an unforgettable covered wagon tour. The stay at the hotel there was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Ending the trip in Long Beach turned out to be a fitting end to the journey with so much to experience and a fantastic hotel stay from which to use as a home base.

We spent the perfect amount of time in each of the locations. It was enough to see most of the highlights in each place while leaving plenty of reasons to return. The weather wasn’t sunny warm, but it was okay for us. It was a lot warmer than at home in Boston!

The biggest disappointment of the trip was the hotel in Palm Springs. I’ve outlined many of the issues we had. We’ve separately reached out to the hotel on multiple occasions to try to get to a satisfactory resolution, but the disappointment keeps growing. Over the month, since we stayed there, the response has evolved from empty to combative. We’ve been accused of faking the pictures we took of the condition of the room, and the hotel only provided the full compensation they promised on checkout after we pushed back multiple times.

I’ve been looking at hotel reviews to see if there is a pattern of people with similar experiences. It seems most reviews are positive, and people have good experiences, though periodically, I see reviews that are eerily similar to our experience. I”m not sure what to make of it. It’s clear from our interactions with the hotel that they feel they are doing a fantastic job. If you do stay at this hotel, I hope you have a pleasant experience. We won’t be giving it a second chance, and next time we go to Palm Springs, we’ll be looking to go somewhere else.

In the near term, this has shaken our loyalty to Marriott in general, though logically, I know this experience is an outlier for us. As chronicled in this blog, we’ve had dozens of great experiences at Marriott hotel, so I know I should put this experience behind us and avoid this particular property in the future. At the same time, we’ve also been exploring expanding our loyalty to include Hyatt, and we’ve had three fantastic experiences in a row with them since our last Marriott stay. As I discussed in my post on our travel goals for 2020, we’ll likely be pursuing less Marriott status in 2020 in favor of getting top-level Hyatt status anyways, though we have at least 25 nights booked for 2020 already, so even backing off is more than most people would consider staying!

Would we make this trip again? I don’t think we’d make the exact trip yet, but I would have no problems revisiting any of these destinations. There’s so much to do in all of these locations that we would not be bored. That said, I don’t expect to go there again soon. We have lots of other places on our list, and there’s only so much time. If our travels have us going to any of these places again, we’d have no problems finding a reason to go!