I have used Priceline.com's name-your-own-price bidding system about a dozen times, and honestly it has been great every time EXCEPT this time. (After I wrote Priceline a long, detailed email explaining the many, many problems we had at this hotel, they actually broke their own policy and DID refund my full purchase price. If there were space for me to post that long letter, you would understand why they refunded my money.) I will try to be more concise here:
* Horrible check-in experience -- took 15 minutes (and it was a priceline.com prepaid voucher!). There was only 1 person ahead of me, but the young kid manning the desk just could not be bothered to pay attention to us standing there. He spent his time chatting and joking with some pal of his who was standing there behind the desk with him. He clearly saw us, but looked right through us.
* Unbelievably HOT room. The central air for the whole hotel does not really work. You sit and SWEAT despite the "air conditioning." There is no way to adjust the climate--you get what the central air system gives you, and what it gives you is a faint stream of tepid air.
* More than half the light bulbs in the room were burned out. The room was so dark that it was hard to move around without bumping into the furniture.
* The all-time noisiest room I have ever stayed in. The room fronted the main drag of Acapulco and the street noise is INCREDIBLY loud. (I had read these reviews at tripadvisor.com advising asking for a HIGH room to mitigate the noise, and I asked for one. They said they had no rooms available on upper floors and gave us one on the 3rd or 4th floor. Honestly, it was so noisy that I don't think it would make much difference if you were another 5 or 10 floors higher than we were.) The walls are mostly glass and absolutely NOT soundproofed at all. The noise is so strong that it is just like sitting out on the street.
* Of the 3 elevators, only 1 worked. You had to wait (literally) nearly 10 minutes for the elevator EACH time you wanted to go up/down. The elevators are teeny tiny, and huge crowds assemble waiting for an elevator. When one finally comes (and it does take 10 minutes) only a small handful of people can get on. You have to stay in line and wait ANOTHER 10 minutes for the 1 elevator to come back again and hope that you can fit onto the elevator this time (not a sure bet). I had read other people complain about the fact that only 1 of 3 elevators works in this hotel, but their reviews were written half a year before my stay in March of 2007, so I assumed they would have all their elevators repaired. WRONG!
* We asked for 2 beds, and I was told we were getting 2 beds. Wrong. Got 1 bed and the rattiest sofa you have ever seen. They told us to call the desk and a maid would come with sheets and make up the sofa for the 2nd bed. We called at 9, 9:30, 10, 10:30, 11. The maid came 2 hours after our first call, threw the ratty, worn, thin, dirty cushions on the tile floor, laid 2 flat sheets over them, and THAT was the 2nd bed!
* I took the actual bed. It was honestly the hardest bed I have ever tried to sleep in (I could not get any sleep at all). They are like CEMENT! I didn't know a mattress could be that rock-solid hard. I've never encountered a mattress like that anywhere else in my life.
* The TV picture scrambled once every 20 seconds or so--and stayed scrambled for 5-10 seconds. We called the desk. They promised a maintenance person--who NEVER CAME. Are you getting an idea by now of what it is like in this hotel?
* The room was SO bad. My friend and I joked that it was like what we imagine a bad room in the old Soviet Union must have been like. It was bare, stark, ugly, the walls dirty, the tile floor full of stains.
* The bathroom had an overwhelming smell of Clorox. The porcelain in the wash basin had been dented through down to the bare metal in 10-15 places (and the bathtub was the same way). The porcelain was filthy with permanent stains, worn down to metal in many places by decades of steel wool scrubbing -- I would estimate the fixtures were perhaps 40-50 years old.
* The 1 or 2 light bulbs that worked were so low wattage that we had to use the flashlight I carry in my backpack to find things in our suitcases.
* The bellhop and valet car park people were very nice and friendly, but the receptionist was absolutely indifferent.
* The phone service did not work well. You had to dial 5-6 times to get through--and when you did get through to the front desk, they always had to transfer you (e.g., for the maid to come make the bed) -- and your call would get lost, and you would have to start over. I must have dialed maybe 30 times between 9:00 and 11:00 and only got through about 5 times to request the maid to come to make the sofa into a "bed" on the floor. We tried to call Priceline so they could get us OUT of this place, but they could never give us a line to call the USA. (I explained this to Priceline, which is why they made an exception and refunded my money even though we did go ahead and stay the night in this horrible hotel.)
* I am stunned and amazed that there are actually some fairly positive reports about this hotel posted here. On the other hand, there are many reviews like mine which say this is the worst place ever. Please, please believe me--this is truly, honestly the worst hotel I have ever stayed at in my life. I am 54 years old and have traveled all over Mexico and Guatemala for decades, and you would normally only find a place this astoundingly bad by paying maybe $5 dollars a night at some fleabag hotel next to a noisy bus station in a metropolitan area. Do not be fooled by the pretty photos of this place -- ALL the money has gone into the street facade. The rooms themselves are just unbelievably bad, so HOT, tawdry, classless, extremely uncomfortable, old, worn, DARK, etc. It is astounding that Priceline had listed this as a 3-star hotel. In what alternate universe could this be defined by any reasonable person as a 3-star hotel? I would give it, literally, zero stars, because it was in every respect such a negative experience. Aside from the chatty and friendly bellhop and the courteous valet parker, everybody and everything else about this hotel was truly (and I mean truly) the all-time worst I have encountered in my decades of travel in Latin America. (I live full-time in Southern Mexico and have lived here since 1991. I do know what I am talking about when I talk about hotel experiences in Mexico.)
* I really hope that this review will help my fellow travelers by convincing them to stay away from this place. (I stayed at the Fiesta Inn another time in Acapulco, also on a priceline.com blind bid, and it is fantastic--and costs the same! Do yourself a huge favor and go up the same street a mile to the Fiesta Inn, as it is all the things that the Avalon Excalibur SAYS it is in their promotional literature but absolutely is NOT.)
* If you are not convinced, let me give you one last detail. My friend and I simply could not sleep. My bed was so hard, and her couch cushion floor "bed" so uncomfortable, and the heat so oppressive, and the street noise so powerful, that we simply checked out at 4 a.m. and continued our road trip on to Mexico City without any sleep at all. We laughed (a lot) about this experience later, but at the time it was really not funny!