Royal Sonesta New Orleans

Excellent Location. Walking distance to many bars, restaurants, street cars and close to Canal st outside of the French Quarter

Nothing of any note

Location

The hotel needs to be updated. The rooms and hallways have seen better days.

The Royal Sonesta is in a great spot. While the rooms are small and nothing to rave about, the restaurant downstairs and jazz bar were amazing. The Bell Boy was really helpful and the pool on a hot day - was a God send.

I wish I hadn't booked via booking.com. We stayed for several days in two rooms and required an adjoining door. Because we had booked via booking.com (and included this requirement) we were treated like second class citizens. The hotel made it clear I should have booked directly with them for better service. Thankfully after several phone calls and emails - upon arrival (and after booking.com intervened), we were given two rooms with adjoining doors. However both were locked and nobody could open them. After about an hour they ripped out the locks entirely. Which was great (not exactly luxury, but great). However we slept poorly in our room while the kids slept well - we were woken by constant noise. It turned out that the second screen (over the window) to reduce the noise in our room was missing, while the one in the kids room was still in place. When I addressed this with reception the next morning, they were useless - lots of "we'll do our best, but we don't have any more rooms with adjoining doors available right now and we don't have the missing screen. please come back later". Which I did four times during the day to be given the same response and to come back later as they were doing their best. By 7pm nothing had changed and we moved to two separate rooms without an adjoining door. My observation is that there are quite a few issues with the hotel and that maintenance are NOT on top of them, the reception staff are powerless to get anything fixed and if you get caught with an issue - they can't do anything about it other than fob you off.