Ashland Hills Hotel & Suites

Spacious Room After reading the review comments, I booked the hotel knowing that I might not get great service and to avoid the free breakfast. We were only staying one night and the price was low. Check-in took some time but wasn’t terrible. We stayed in a premium king room and it was very spacious I liked it. The room overlooked the pool. About 10 kids were playing in the pool. Where their parents were was anybody’s guess since the kids played a raucous game of Marco Polo until 10pm. But thankfully the hotel shut down the pool promptly at 10 and I had a quiet night’s sleep.

Avoid this hotel with poor service and lack of working amenities We have been to Ashland many times to attend Oregon Shakespeare Festival shows and have stayed in a variety of motels/hotels over the years, most of them close to the theaters. We had never stayed at Ashland Hills before - we chose it based on the ratings and reviews, deciding that it was worth staying a bit further out for such a highly rated hotel. Oh my goodness were we disappointed! The person who checked us in did not welcome us or really converse at all. It was a cold business transaction with a number of directives about where to go and when. Check out was pretty much the same. Interestingly, we were not asked how our stay was. This is a large property with multiple buildings and a somewhat confusing layout where "floor 2" was the ground floor for the building we were in, which was separate from the lobby where we checked in. Also, this is a property that appears to have been built in the 1960s with minimal updates. They are trying to emphasize the “retro” styling and decor. The stairways have a musty smell and there is only one elevator for each building. During our stay, the elevator was out of service for one day out of the five. Once we got our bearings, we finally found our room. On the positive side, the 2 queen room was quite spacious. However, the weak AC meant that we walked into a stuffy, warm room. We ran the AC the entire time to avoid the room becoming unbearable in the heat. There was a small deck with chairs that had a view of the parking lot and loud traffic at all hours (including several groups of motorcycles). Water pressure in the bright yellow tiled retro shower was also very weak. We all travel with a number of devices including computers and smart phones, so we wanted to get those connected to the advertised complimentary WiFi. We were able to find the network listed on the paper provided during check in, but none of our devices could actually connect to the internet from our room. The only place that WiFi worked for most of our stay was near the lobby, quite a walk from our room. On the last day, we noticed a hotel WiFi network with a different name appear when in our room and that did work but was quite slow. We wanted to take advantage of the in room refrigerator for food, so that we did not have to eat every meal out. We went grocery shopping and got milk, yogurt, lunch meat, fruit, and beverages. Within a day, everything in the fridge was frozen solid (the milk carton was like a brick and the lunch meat was like a small frisbee). This was inconvenient! We called the front desk to have someone look at this. The maintenance person did arrive fairly quickly, but we were leaving for the day and didn’t see what they actually did. Unfortunately it made no difference whatsoever and our only recourse was to take things out to defrost, run things under warm water, and just deal with things like cans of soda being warm to avoid them exploding (one almost did before we realized the problem, the can was very bloated). On our first morning, we did try the complimentary hotel breakfast. Our experience over the years has taught us not to expect anything special from a free hotel breakfast, but this really was below the bar. Even at 7:30am (breakfast is over at 10am) the eggs were cold and thus not safe to eat. They also had a sign for non-dairy milk (which would have been appreciated) but did not actually have that milk. We did not return to the breakfast for the rest of our stay. The hotel has signs in many of the hallways for an on-site restaurant called Luna Cafe. This restaurant was oddly closed for our entire stay and thus not an option as an alternative. While most hotels have transitioned to every-other-day housekeeping as the norm, this hotel is every-third-day housekeeping (not mentioned anywhere on the hotel website). What this meant for us is that for a five night stay, we had housekeeping exactly once after the third night of our stay. While it is possible to request needed items like TP from the front desk, they did not always have someone to bring the items up, requiring us to go down to the front desk. Overall, this hotel is not a good value and seems to have declined significantly relative to the ratings and reviews that convinced us to book - the title of the hotel website still currently includes the text "Named One of the Best in Southern Oregon". For the nightly rate that we paid, we could have stayed within walking distance of the OSF theaters. Alternatively, we could have saved quite a bit of money staying at the hotel across from this one, which is about a 10 minute drive from the theaters (not walkable). I would recommend that you avoid this hotel and choose any of the much better options in Ashland.

Don’t Go now. Under new ownership since March, this hotel has had a mass exodus of employees. So…no bar. Restaurant is open intermittently from 11:30 to 2:00. Housekeeping only occurs on the third day of a stay. Breakfast is a joke with rotted fruit and virtually no healthy options except cheerios. No yogurt, no other fruit except overripe oranges. Hotel staff is clueless about where to dine or drink. Forget this one until management gets it’s act together.

Underwhelming The hotel itself seemed nice and had we reserved a typical room it probably would have been satisfactory but we reserved the Manhattan Suite which was clean and lovely but didn’t have the functionality that we had upgraded for. That being a separate living area from the bedroom and a bar/kitchenette. We had to buy a corkscrew to open a bottle of wine and then there were no wine glasses among the bar glasses. Given that there are vineyards all over the area it seems that wine glasses and a corkscrew would be the most basic of items to have on hand. There is a kitchenette and a dining room table but no other kitchen or bar ware were provided. The whirlpool tub and shower were wonderful and very relaxing. The bedroom doors were glass and offered no privacy. If one person wanted to nap the only way to darken the room was to close the living room curtains. So the person not napping would still be left in the dark. That is one reason why booking a suite with a separate room is worth spending the money. The dresser is not in the bedroom, it’s is near the main door on the other side of the suite. So half our clothes were in the closet and the other half across the suite in the dresser. The suite is decorated well and decor, not functionality seemed to be the priority. Breakfast was subpar. The biscuits and potatoes were hard and dry and the a portion of the grapes were rotten each day. There were Quaker oatmeal packets. And on the day they served bacon it was gone an hour before breakfast ended. We are unlikely to stay here again.

Tired travelers who needed a good nights sleep and nice breakfast. First time here and everything was wonderful except their coffee. That is not enough to keep us away. The beautiful clean quiet room and great staff made up for it. The room had comfortable beds and sitting area. The shower was the best we have had in a hotel. Nice job.