Amazing rooms, terrible lobby design causing endless queues to check out.

I only stayed in the Marco Polo for one night, so I admit that this review might not cover every experience had I stayed for longer.

Getting to the Marco Polo from the airport is relatively painless depending on what time you land in Manila. If you land at 3 am on a Tuesday morning, then it is probably going to take you about 30 minutes door to door. If you land at 7 pm on Friday evening, then you can expect that same journey to take about 1 hour and 45 minutes.

The actual location of the hotel isn’t what you would call “prime Manila,” but if you want to experience some local drinking, you can head across the road to Metro Walk, which has a ton of local style bars and restaurants with live bands and endless San Miguel Light.

The first thing you’ll notice when you get to the Marco Polo is that there is a single desk on the bottom floor with a café to the left and lobby style seating. You have to go around to the elevators and head up to the 30th (I think) floor to get to the actual lobby. Even checking in at 4 am meant waiting for the elevator to make its journey up and down the building.

The main check-in lobby is quite grand and open. I approached the check-in desk with my ID and credit card in hand ready to get up to my room. There were two gentlemen at the check-in desk and between them, it took them well over 10 minutes to process my pre-booking. After these 10 minutes, I was asked to sit down whilst someone checked the room. This then took a further 10 minutes. So, at 4 am with absolutely no one else in the hotel lobby, it took me about 20 minutes to check into a pre-booked room.

When I actually got up to the room, though, I was blown away. These rooms are by far the most spacious in any Manila hotel room. The bathroom features a full-size bathtub and a large shower area. The shower was incredibly powerful and the perfect temperature. The layout of the room was excellent. With all the space, you could literally do anything you pleased. The curtains had the dreaded gap in the middle, which meant that light came shining through at 6 am. But the view across the metro was pretty nice from 40+ floors up.

I was actually attending a conference in the same hotel. So around 12 noon, I ventured down to the lobby to get to my speaking session, and I was blown away again, only this time for very different, bad reasons.

The elevators from the rooms down to the 30th-floor lobby are pretty quick, but because there are only 2 (maybe 3, but it matters not) dedicated elevators going from the bottom floor and conference levels into the main lobby, then you are stuck waiting for everyone to check out and get into them. This is no hyperbole when I say there must have been about 35-45 people queuing from the check-out desk to get an elevator to the ground floor. I asked if I could use the stairs to get to the 9th-floor conference room, but was told I had to wait for the elevator. It really was the single most frustrating hotel experience I have had and took about 20 minutes of just standing there to get an elevator out of the lobby.

The conference was well organised. The room provided by the hotel sat nearly 300 people and the food was great. So if you are planning to use the facilities for a conference, then I do recommend that part.

After the conference, we went up to the Vu bar at the top of the building. Just like the rooms, this bar has an incredible view of the city skyline. There is seating indoors and on either side are the two outside bars, which is really where you want to be if you are heading up.

Since I had a late check-out, I was able to get the elevator down after only waiting about 5 or so minutes. I thought to myself as I was heading to the ground floor that the rooms and the Vu bar are really quite exquisite, but the awfully slow check-in and ridiculous lines for the elevators left a very sour taste in my mouth.