Estancia La Jolla Hotel & Spa

It was supposed to be a valentine's day on the wee

The place was beautiful.

First, My girlfriend and I arrived to relax our first valentine's day weekend for one night. I made an arrangement with the Spa to have a couple's massage which included the tub. The tub was broken and replaced for hands and feet massage with the package. We had our dinner reservations at the spa. Our suitcases were not in our room per our request, and we had to have our clean clothes to wear prior our dinner reservation. After, we got our bags. We went down to Mustangs & Burros for our dinner reservation and found out it was closed, and there was a sign to go to a different restaurant within the hotel. The restaurant setting was crappy and dark. The food was not great, and we each had a very pricey glass of wine which is not even full. $30 each drink!!!! ridiculous! It was not a great place for a new couple to celebrate first valentine's day!

Motel 8 quality at luxury prices

I liked the pool. It's a salt water pool and is great to be in as well as the hot tub. The pool area in general is lovely.

There was carpet torn up in our room exposing the tack strips that hold it down causing pretty serious potential danger when walking around barefoot. Obviously the room was not checked prior to booking us into it which i would expect at these prices. That's bad enough to warrant another option in the future but the remedy for them was to tell us they were sending a maintenance person at some point in the future to fix it. No one came for an hour. We then called back annoyed we'd been wasting time sitting in the room instead of at their facilities and another front desk person said they would get on it immediately and we could change our room if we wanted to. After no service for the next hour or so i finally went to the front and asked what was going on. They apologized, and gave me a new room. They said someone could help us move our stuff to a new room. With our dinner reservations only minutes in the future I ran back to the room to start moving stuff and a staff member showed up maybe 15 minutes later to help, with them knowing full well we were in a rush to change rooms because of dinner reservations. There was nothing left for them to do. This caused us to be late to dinner. This did not cause serious trouble because the restaurant was able to accommodate us. But we were stressed and worried! We did get a call later in the evening telling us we would get our resort fees back ($25) in compensation. I don't think this fee is appropriate to begin with so I do not consider this a remedy at all. It's also a very small portion of our total costs at the hotel in relation to the inconvenience it caused us. After that saga, we returned from dinner to a couple in a room above us yelling and screaming at each other and stomping around. We tried to call the front desk after it did not cease for about 30 minutes. There was no one to receive our call at 12 midnight. After a couple attempts I decided to get dressed for a trip to the front desk and figure out what the heck is going on with the service at this place!! There was one person working the area when i got there and he apologized he was not available for our calls earlier. They seem very understaffed for a luxury hotel. He said they would look into the issue immediately. There was some additional banging of doors and yelling through the night but it was not continuous so i'm not really blaming them for that, but the level of service is just not at all what I wanted for a birthday weekend of luxury and relaxation!! I would expect what we got from a cheap hotel chain at about $40/night.