Fontainebleau Miami Beach

Hannah & Jacob (Pool & Cabana staff) were both outstanding. Cabana was clean and well stocked with fresh towels, fruit and water throughout the entire day. The drink and food service were both ten out of ten. Hannah and Jacob stopped by often to make sure our expectations were exceeded all day long.

Beach side and pool side service might be the friendliest people I’ve ever met. You can’t go wrong with anyone here, but from personal experience… (beachside) Julian, Elizabeth, Lee, Jayden, Kat, and Johnny have been such a big factor in making our honeymoon fun! (Poolside) Gianpiero has been our guy hooking us up most days that we’ve been here. Service is 11/10! (Fontainebleau, make sure you take good care of them because they are taking GREAT care of us!)

I try not to leave negative reviews, but I just got home from a three-day convention at the Fontainebleau and it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. The bad: This hotel is basically a convention factory (there were three running concurrently during my visit), with a couple thousand rooms scattered over several towers and a cluster of restaurants, pools, and services beneath. Property management clearly understands that a lot of people probably have to stay here, and that a lot of them have expense accounts/corporate cards – and they seem to have taken this as an opportunity to provide minimal services/quality for high prices. For instance, my room: It was in the “Versailles” tower and cost in excess of $300/night. It was mostly functional and charmless and fine, with a view over a massive convention center roof and – shockingly – no coffee maker or any way to heat up water. And when I asked the Concierge why there was no coffee machine in my room, she informed me that rooms in that tower don’t come with a coffee maker but that I could buy an espresso at the lobby coffee shop for EIGHT DOLLARS. This is inexcusable, especially for $300+/night. Motel 6s in Omaha (or Miami, for that matter) have coffee makers, and this feels like a willful decision by hotel ownership to save money at the expense of the guest experience. And this model applies throughout the hotel. The gym is barely adequate for the volume of guests and the equipment outdated; the restaurants are fine but extremely overpriced; the reception desk routinely had a line of 20-30 people and only a handful of attendants, and when I checked out this morning, I arrived to find an empty desk and had to stand there yelling “hello!” for several minutes before anyone appeared. I locked myself out of my room at one point and was told to go to the "key pickup" office, where there was nobody working and no one to help. And the location is juuust far enough away from the central parts of South Beach that it’s too far to walk, so – if you don’t feel like taking a cab or the unreliable civic shuttle to a different area – you’re functionally trapped with the options at hand. Dig in. Literally every single person I spoke to at my convention complained about the Fontainebleau – even the keynote speaker, a global expert on luxury experience, who used his address to tell a story about checking in, finding that his room had an unmade bed and had not been cleaned, and the hotel taking 90 minutes to find him a new place to land. The good: The staff of the hotel was very friendly and I was amazed at how clean it felt, especially with the volume of guests and conventioneers passing through every corridor at all hours of the day. The housekeepers did a nice job and the room, while outdated, felt clean and tidy. It's on the beach. :-/

Kobi, our amazing server on the beach, was very pleasant and professional. She was attentive and provided excellent service. We thoroughly enjoyed our time on the beach. Also, get an umbrella!! The sun gets hot fast! Best $26 spent to date!

Jalen was absolutely gr8, pleasant & happy! Don't let him go! He was courteous & smiling @ everyone! It was a pleasure meeting him! Also went around constantly picking up USED towels all over & Gianprieto told me that he learns from him how 2 deal with people!