The Highlander Hotel Iowa City, an Ascend Collection Hotel

Over promised and underdelivered If I was just rating the room, I'd probably say a 2.5. But the hotel overall was a 1.5. First the room. Everything worked but there was dust here and there and the doors and woodwork were pretty beat up. The bed was comfortable. We were on the 2nd floor overlooking the pool and the shades were ineffective in keeping out the light from the pool. My confirmation email (which took 3 phone calls to get) said that breakfast was included. Upon arrival they said it was "grab and go". Day 1 there was a bowl of fruit, some nutrigrain bars and Trix bars, and coffee, tea, and water. Day 2 the fruit bowl contained 2 oranges and 2 overripe bananas. What a joke! The pool was nice and big but it seemed that the area around it was never mopped, it looked dirty. The garage doors were never opened while we were there. The pool bar/food window was only open 1 of the two days. The hot tub was closed our entire visit. We got no housekeeping during our visit, which we weren't told about. We weren't given the wifi password on check-in and it wasn't displayed anywhere in the room so I had to go to the desk and ask (there are no room phones). I could find no info about their cancellation policy on their website or in my confirmation email. I texted to ask since their email encouraged texts, but they never responded. No staff could be found when I left, despite pushing their buzzer twice. After 5 minutes I just left. If all of their advertised amenities were actually provided, it'd be worth the price. As it is, I'd recommend going elsewhere.

Traveler Beware! My travel and need for a room in Iowa City was due to an appointment at the University hospital that required an overnight stay, it was to rest and relax in a stressful situation. I called on Tuesday, June 18th to request early check in at noon and agreed to pay $25 per hour for early access (shocked by this, as I have stayed all over the world in hotels ranging from convenience to luxury and have never been asked to do this). Unfortunately, when I arrived just before noon on June 19th I was greeted by an empty reception desk and had to find someone to process my check in. I pressed the call button for assistance and eventually a staff member responded. When I told him I was there for check in, he said that it was unlikely since guest checkout was at 11 am and early check ins were not allowed until 2 pm, which is what he said was noted on my reservation and elaborated to say he remembered talking to me earlier in the day, which was a lie, I had called the day before and spoken with a female to make the early check in arrangements. He then proceeded to make excuses of new staff, poor training on policy knowledge, etc. So, as guest relations agent scrambled to find me a clean room to sleep in, I went to use the common area bathroom which was below expectation for the accommodations on the website. The seat on which I sat, nearly dumped me onto the bathroom floor and my experience with your hotel only got worse from there. When I returned from the restroom, I noticed heavily pooled water in the reception area floor which was not marked with any CAUTION wet floor signage and pointed it out to staff member as well as making him aware of the broken toilet seat. After which, the guest agent said “we have just mopped” but made no attempt to put signage up, and then told me he would make sure to get toilet repaired, he also said he was removing the early access charges from my bill as a concession for my already poor experience, this did not happen, I was billed the full amount. We were finally given wristbands and instructions to find our room. Moving on to the rest of our experience: My granddaughters were eager to swim but we were not able to open our poolside slider to access the pool and had to call guest services for assistance. The woman who came to assist also struggled but was finally able to get it for us from the pool side. Odd that door does not overlock from the inside but does from the outside, this made me feel very insecure in a room with my two young granddaughters! The swimming pool area is very unsafe with slippery tile surrounding the entire pool area, generally, there is slip resistant tile as to mitigate slips and falls. The "hot tub” temperature was less hot than a normal warm bath. The swimming pool area was obviously without daily cleaning and it was not clear for how many days. There were several wet towels strewn about on the furniture, glassware sitting poolside, and debris in the pool including a towel all of which my grandchildren retrieved and removed from the pool (they saw this as a diving game, I saw this as unacceptable). The pool area went unclean for the entirety of our stay. We still tried to make the best of a bad situation by retrieving board games from the reception area, none of which were complete with pieces or instructions. We visited the arcade, where we found 20% of all equipment was not powered on so I assumed in some state of disrepair, as such, we chose not to purchase tokens and take our chances with any games that were powered on. Signs were posted that outside food & beverage were not allowed to be consumed outside of our rooms, but we saw no sign of staff to prepare food or sell beverages to us (there was a bartender sitting on a cooler in the arcade bar who was less than engaged with serving anything to anyone & seemed annoyed when we inquired about game tokens). The poolside snack shack/bar, dining room, and reception area bar were unstaffed the entirety of our stay. To end the night, my eldest granddaughter showered and to our disgust the drain was clogged and the tub began to fill. I called the guest services number with no answer, was redirected to leave voicemail, waited for some time with no response so went to walk the empty halls of the hotel in search of assistance. Found someone who said it was likely user error, as he thought I may not know how to pull a plug to drain a tub (laughable) so he came to the room to pull it for us, after he failed to raise an already raised plug, he agreed it must be clogged but only offered his assistance to use “drano” which would make the tub further inoperable, or move us to another room as maintenance would not be available until morning. I declined both of these options as I feared a new room may give us new unacceptable issues, as as such I dismissed him so we could sleep off our stressful day and stay in your overhyped underwhelming establishment. The Highlander Hotel is advertised as “Urban Oasis”, which is far from truth. Please use caution!

Pictures are false!! We got sucked in because the pictures looked so good. This place is completely opposite of the pictures and stated “amenities”. First, it’s a very old hotel that has been lightly redone. It still looks very old and worn. We came in on a Thursday night for a med school graduation. One person working all the areas and he was not really interested in working at all. We stayed until Saturday. The lobby bar was never open. The Shake Shack/snack shack did NOT serve shakes (they were not willing to make them). They also did not serve alcohol drinks, even though there is a full bar and a bar menu. The really cool garage doors around the pool are never open and it was a beautiful weekend! No fires in any fire pit. If you spend the extra money to have rooms around the pool, be aware that you are essentially locked in from the pool side until a worker unlocks all doors at exactly 9:00 am. You can not open your door before that time. We would have liked to sit out there and enjoy a quiet coffee but were unable to. The tables that are outside of your door can not be used unless you get food from the hotel. That would be acceptable except the food is terrible at best and only offered on a very limited time schedule. We paid almost 1,000$ to stay here and are terribly disappointed that we did not stay at The Graduate downtown. We fell for the impressive pictures and the listed amenities. This place is dismal and disappointing. We come through this area often and we will never make this mistake again.

Don't bother unless a pool is your first priority. This hotel was built in 1967, apparently to try to bring a resort experience to central Iowa. The pool is the big attraction. Even room keys are designed to be worn around your wrist. The building has a heavy industrial feel - vinyl floors, limited space, huge windows, no desk chair (I stood up to work at the computer), poor lighting, shortage of electrical outlets, no elevators. The real frosting on our cake, though, was the "battery low" alarm going off in our smoke detector at 3:50 a.m. Of course, there's no one to fix this in the middle of the night; so no more sleep. Breakfast was very limited. We would have eaten our own cereal, but there wasn't any milk.

Pleasant Overnight Stay. Very eco friendly. Actually had paper coffee cups that were not individually wrapped in plastic. No plastic bottles of shampoo or conditioner. No plastic bag in wastebaskets. Great courtyard and pool areas. Restaurant with limited menu and bar on premises. Morning breakfast was ok at best. Loved the hippie atmosphere with peace signs and all. Clean and well maintained facilities with tons of public space.