The St. Regis Deer Valley

It’s a beautiful Hotel located in a wonderful Ski area. Friendly people, nice accomodations, good food so far. But the hotel decided to have a separate tent just in front of the main facade, with a cloubhouse scenery and loud music (from thursday - sunday), where many rooms are facing to it. Instead of enjoying a sundowner you have to close the windows because music is loud and annoying. So please take care in choosing your rooms. May be these kind of category that faces to the north overlooking a big parking lot is a better choice.

The hotel is great. The outside restaurant is awesome. The inside restaurant is AWFUL. They will tell excessively long wait times despite a half empty restaurant. It’s a night and day experience between outside and inside. Whoever their manager is should take a closer look, they are definitely losing money.

This is our 3rd time staying at a St. Regis (after Rome and Bora Bora) and unfortunately it has been the worst. From housekeeping forgetting to replace a robe and not removing used glasses to the butler service telling us that the restaurant didn’t have reservations left while online it shows multiple slots open, to the spa needing maintenance ASAP, it pales in comparison to the service at the other 2 St. Regis. The location is great and the rooms comfortable.

So many amazing things about the hotel (and one GIGANTIC flaw, unless you're a shark who has always dreamt of living in a fish cannery.) Now let's start with the good! Is this place absolutely magical during the holidays? Will your children get to pose with live reindeer? Yes, your Christmas cards are gonna be lit! Will they get to live out their Hansel and Gretel dreams with a full sized gingerbread house full of endless delectable meringues shaped like Santa hats, decorated sugar cookies, and freshly spun cotton candy? Yes! Will they fight in the lobby with their newly created balloon swords while you exclaim and cry globs of tears over the hilarious caricatures of them created by the hotel's artist in the lobby? Yes! Do you get to do this with the glass of Moet they just sabored? Yes! Is the ski valet absolutely amazing and so accommodating, down to the nicest man running the lift tickets print out? Yes! Is housekeeping amazing, is the room spotless? Yes! So... It's amazing, but why, you might ask, did you give only 3 stars??? Funny thing you might ask!!!! We've done the good, now let's hit the food! Do you ever feel like you're in the TV show The Good Place? Everything looks amazing and perfect, but then a tiny million things go wrong. At first, you're like, it's ok, no worries, no big deal and after the ten thousandth time the entire container of salt pours out when you're trying to season your food, you're like, wait, this is the bad place. (If I spoiled the show, sorry, but it's been like YEARS guys.) Well, folks, it felt like they had a pre-service in the kitchen as they saw me heading into the hotel to prep their million different ways to break my patient spirit because it felt like I was being tested any time I tried to get near food in this hotel. You're probably exhausted of me so I'll try and keep it short. (As I proceed to not keep it short.) Do you love the smell of rotting shrimp? Do you want it to pervade the smell of your room and send you spiraling into a small mental breakdown as they gaslight you? If so, this is the perfect hotel for you! I assume you must be an orca looking to book a ski vacation, so read on, as we journey together! I'd like to preface this by: I have very calm and reasonable young children, who love to patiently wait for their food (sense the sarcasm?) After a number of failed meals at the hotel restaurant where my patience was heavily tested and food took over an hour to arrive (once possibly because the server forgot to put it in, or because the kitchen lost the ticket as the server claimed - it's a secret I'll never know), I decided we would try room service so at least my kids could watch TV while we waited. It's ok, I tell myself - I figured out the hack for eating and I'm prepared for this, fool me once, fool me twice - you get it. Well well, jokes on me! So I order some food - a mushroom truffle pasta that I had previously that honestly truly was heavenly, a pasta with shrimp for my son and a quesadilla for my daughter. Expecting an hour wait, I turn on Disney and start packing because we have an early flight in the morning. I'm Mom of the year, I've got this, I'm firmly patting myself on the back. Yeah, I don't got this. The food arrives in an hour later and immediately, I know something is wrong. There's a smell that immediately hits the room. Well, it's ok, I tell myself, I'm sure it's fine, just ignore it. It's the St. Regis, I bet it's just in my head, I'm being crazy. I sign for the bill, and I open the tray covers. Mushroom pasta, looks fine, quesadilla, looks great too, pasta with shr...? The smell hits my face, as if I'm downwind from a cove full of seals. Like the combination of a garbage dump and rotting fish carcasses, inside a formaldehyde factory. I poke at the shrimp and lift one up to my face. Are shrimp supposed to be grey after they're cooked? The parts of my brain are actively fighting now - there's the rational part that knows the shrimp is way past rotting and the delulu part of my brain that is trying to manage the fact that I'm now physically blocking my hungry children who have immediately tried to descend upon the food. Well, my brain reaches a compromise - I'll just take a bite to make sure. I'm sure it'll be ok, the delulu side of my brain confidently declares. I take a bite and immediately the rational side of my brain starts screaming expletives as I run to the garbage and start violently spitting the food out, as visions of me in United economy the next morning, puking my guts out from food poisoning, swim in my head. It's ok, I tell myself, as I calmly call the front desk. At this point, I cannot consider the idea of eating, so I tell them to just take the shrimp pasta off and we will share what we have left. I hang up. My son starts weeping at the prospect of eating pasta with mushrooms. Normally, I can handle this like a normal parent and use this as a teachable moment. But, in this moment, I am only consumed by the fact that my mouth tastes like I have just licked the liquid that pools at the bottom of a garbage can when you take the full bag out. I cannot handle life currently and I attempt to take the easy way out and I call the front desk back and beg them to make a pasta, but plain, please, with no shrimp anywhere near it. The children eat the quesadilla and we wait for the plain pasta to arrive. I have brushed and flossed and gargled with every ounce of mouthwash I have found. Unfortunately, it's taking a while, and wooden cabinet in which the garbage can (where I threw in the shrimp) is no match for the smell. The smell is actively now leaching out, and marinating the room. This of course, makes me more patient, and rational. It's been about an hour and the children are now way past their bedtime (I've fed them all the snacks I brought from home and they're wired), the room smells like the inside of a diaper pail, and the pasta still has not arrived. I just need to get the kids to bed. I call the front desk to tell them to cancel the pasta, they put me on hold for about 5 minutes, and then I suddenly hear a knock on the door. It's the pasta and a server who looks like she wants to be here in this moment as much as I do. At this point, I'm truly about to lose it (remember, I still have to get the kids to bed, pack, and it's been two hours since I originally ordered dinner and I have two young children). I am still on the phone with the front desk and I am simultaneously telling them and the server that I need to send the pasta back because we actually do not have time to eat it. I am being convinced by both sides to accept the food and I just want it all to go away, so I just tell the server to leave the pasta on the table. Ok, she says, but... I'm going to need you to sign the bill because um, you have to pay for the replacement pasta. Anywayyyyyyyy, soooooo, I definitely don't start sobbing at this moment. I take a look at the bill (I think it's like 25 dollars or something cray) and I immediately start blubbering about how I just need her to leave with the pasta ASAP. She then begins to ask me what was wrong with the shrimp, which elicits what feels like the longest stare from me. I respond, "Can you not smell it?" To which she responds that her manager was asking her lots of questions about how we knew it was spoiled. Wait... am I being gaslit by the St. Regis? Anyway, she does leave with the pasta, along with my pride and sanity and I manage to get the kids into bed. As my sanity returns, I tie off the garbage bag with the shrimp and leave it on the room service cart in the hallway, telling myself the room will just air out in a few minutes. I try and shower the smell off and I get into bed, resigning myself to a lifetime of smelling like a tuna cannery. As I'm drifting off to sleep, I'm awoken by my husband standing at the foot of the bed, having just come back from dinner and drinks with work colleagues. "What the (BLEEP) is this smell? What died in here?!" I feel vindicated. I'm not crazy! I then, as a sane person might, immediately start bawling. Through my sobs, I tell him what happened. It's ok though, I tell him, because my coat already has a base smell of ketchup, so this is just achieving a perfect layered eau! Oh, did I forget to mention that they spilled a container of ketchup on my coat when I was in the bathroom at lunch one day and told me they had no idea how it happened and I had to use baby wipes I had in my bag to clean it up? (I mean, it's not fur, it's a ski coat, I just machine washed it at home a few days later, but still.) My husband leaves to go to the front desk where they offer to send someone to clean the room, if we wake up the kids (LOL) and they pass along his number to the food services manager. The manager does comp the room service bill, so I will give that to them... But, St. Regis, if you read this, please please fix your restaurant service before high season. And if someone put you guys up to testing my patience to see how far it would go, please... Let me know who that was, I definitely want to know because I have some words for them! I promise you, they're great words! 😂

I was in shock. On the second night of my stay, St. Regis gifted me with a large, loud outdoor wedding reception below my window. You know the type of reception—a few hundred people having a great loud time, a very loud band, etc. Most hotels would limit the festivities to a large ballroom or other place where the other paying guests wouldn’t be disturbed. Not St. Regis. The whole mess was outside, right under my decks and windows. So much for my peaceful evening in the mountains. I would have expected some kind of warning when booking (none), warning when checking in (none), or even an offer at check in to move to a room on the quieter, downgraded side of the building. Zilch. St. Regis really wanted me to hear the party. The following morning, I asked the ghoul at the reception desk about the chaos and whether I could expect more of the same. The response was a glare and “the HOA allows this.” As a nightly guest, I don’t know anything about their bloody HOA, nor do I care. I just wanted a peaceful retreat to the mountains. A subsequent query via their app got something closer to an apology, and a reminder of all of their amenities at my disposal. The only amenity not on offer was peace and quiet, To put it bluntly, it seems like St. Regis doesn’t care about their guests, and disturbing paying guests is no problem if they can get even more money from an extravagant wedding. Just another money-grubbing Marriott chain with no true interest in the guest experience. And don’t get me started on that silly funicular and the dysfunctional parking. What a mess!