Dream Hollywood

This is my critical and honest assessment of my stay at The Dream Hollywood, which was anything but their "living the dream" slogan. Starting with the rooms themselves, the accommodations were modest, the furniture was dated and our room had little to no privacy between the bathroom and bedroom areas. The vanity lighting was abysmal and insufficient. Breakfast was not included with our room rate/"resort fee"/California visit tax (yeah, that was a thing), but we did receive complimentary self serve tea and coffee between the hours of 7-9AM in the main lobby. The best and most useful amenity we took full advantage of was the complimentary car service. It's worth noting this is a drop off service ONLY and return pickups are not included. Continuing with the facilities, one of the main features that informed our decision to stay at The Dream Hollywood, was the impression that there were two separate pools on the premises. This was implied by the photos on their website, as well as during a call made to reservation services. When we arrived however, we learned there was only one pool and it was a shared public space between hotel guests and visitors of the Highlight Room restaurant, which frequently held private events in the space. While this in itself was a disappointment, you could imagine our dismay when we discovered the pool was more of a pond with a depth of only 3 ft. designed for socializing rather than recreational swimming. And while the pool manager and staff were pleasant and attentive, the opposite can be said of the staff of The Highlight Room, who were dismissive, uninformed, and to put it bluntly, seems to care less about providing reasonable customer service unless you were a celebrity or frequent patron with whom they were on a first name basis - then they couldn't move fast enough. To witness this firsthand was laughable to me, but the differential treatment was upsetting to my spouse. The pool manager Karl noticed and offered us complimentary tickets to the evening pool party, but we chose not to return that day. Later in the week we had issues with the plumbing/cleaning service in our room and were upgraded as a result. From that point on the Dream staff (who were truly a Dream Team) worked tirelessly to make the remainder of our stay as enjoyable as possible. These rockstars include Rafael in engineering, Joseph, Keela, Malou, Keni, and Emmanuel in guest relations. If not for their effort we probably wouldn't consider a return stay here. Read less