DoubleTree By Hilton San Diego Hotel Circle in San Diego, CA

I took a group of middle school band students to this location as part of our weekend overnight trip. We encountered issues almost immediately. We arrived at about 9:30PM to check in. We were a block of 20 rooms with 15 of them being student rooms. Keys were ready, cookies available, and a roster printed of all the rooms we had on the same floor. Awesome! As I start sorting the keys I notice that 3 of them have different floor numbers than the roster. I chalked it up to an error and let them know they accidentally put the wrong room on it. The employee helping me at the counter was very receptive and began working on figuring out the issue. A couple minutes in she asks her night shift manager for help and that’s when the problems start. The manager spends 20 minutes of radio silence working on the rooms. I’m annoyed since I have 2 busses of students waiting, however I assume she is at least sorting out the problem. Nope. She then prints a list and simply tells me she has updated the list (20 minutes later) to reflect the student rooms being on the random floors by themselves. I question her how they could be assigning groups of kids to stay on a floor separate from an adult and she just shrugged her shoulders. She said our large group booking was “bumped” and there was nothing she could do. I ended up assigning all but one of our adult rooms to the separate floors, and after an hour at least the kids were going to the rooms. Well… only 2 working elevators slowed us down a little bit but we made it. We then get in and find that the rooms are not in great shape. A few students have holes in the wall, and there are major rust spots in about half the bathtubs. This is not a motel 6… we’re expecting a clean room. Even though the hotel had our room assignments as 4 students to a room, they still only had 2 towels in most rooms. I called down to let them know that we needed additional towels and they told me I needed to come bring them up for the rooms myself. Unhappily I oblige and stock the rooms with the basic needs of a towel. We go to sleep and move on. The following morning we notice the elevators are even slower than the night before. Turns out another guest room is stuck in one of the elevators. When I get to the lobby I see multiple guests urging them to call the fire department. The hotel continuously let them know they were working on it with engineering. By the time we left 30 minutes later, they were still stuck and the fire department still wasn’t called. When we returned, we found that housekeeping had gone in and removed many of the rooms towels and replaced them with two again. And again I got to go back and forth down to the front desk to retrieve more. The kicker was around midnight when the second night when I hear loud music coming from a couple doors down. I discover somebody who must have been housekeeping (wasn’t wearing housekeeping uniform though) cleaning a room. But they were doing it with the door open and music blasting. They were just tossing the dirty sheets into the hall and worked on the room for at least an hour. Overall the hotel service was abysmal outside of the breakfast staff who did a really great job accommodating our large group. We have done this trip numerous times staying at this location, but the quality of the hotel has gone way down since our last visit and we will not be returning

Dirty and Sad— I strongly advise you to look elsewhere when deciding on where to stay in San Diego. I liked the location so I chose this Double Tree. Upon check in, the room was disgustingly dirty. Crumbs under the sofa, stains all over the carpet. Torn sheets. Rust in tub. Water damage on bathroom door. Junky sofas with stains and bent legs. The list goes on. The AC ran for the entire time I stayed and never cooled off the room. I paid $986 for three nights. What a waste of money.

I had such a horrible experience at this hotel in July 2024, that it took me 6 months of post-tramautic stress blockage to finally come to write a review. Travelers should beware. This place makes a mockery of the Hilton Doubletree brand. It is definitely not reflective - I'd imagine a Super8 motel is much nicer, with better service than this place. I just read the review of a traveler who had a bad experience on Christmas Eve 2024 on TripAdvisor and it brought back the floodgates of memory of how horrible our experience in July 2024 was. We stayed with our family of 4, together with 12 other families staying her for 4 days for a local girls softball tournament. They delayed giving our rooms to us by hours - we just stood in the lobby from 2pm until 7pm, with no offer of water, or an apology. They said they were shampooing the carpets of the rooms after hotel guests had checked out earlier at 1pm. At 7pm, we finally demanded to get into our rooms, they still almost denied us but reluctantly took us. Our rooms were dumps - peeling wallpaper, carpets were sopping wet, no one could walk in without keeping shoes on, and our shoes got squishy from the wet old carpets. The hotel management had no apologies - those women are something. I wouldn't wish this dump of a hotel on a dog. While I am a frequent traveler, I have expressly avoided all Hiltons for the past 6 months, because of my horrible experience with this hotel management. They are really a disaster of a management, they make horrible operational decisions (who shampoos carpets 2 hours before guests are supposed to check into their rooms?), and oh - they decided to paint the walls on Saturday night, and left notes on our doors that all the walls and doors were wet from paint. The list goes on of the idiocracy. Would just caution travelers beware - there are so many better options in San Diego area. Dont get stuck with the worst hotel customer service, bar none, and gross dirty dank smelly rooms.

We had one of their worst experiences of any Hilton hotel, and definitely bad for double tree. I am a Diamond member so I have stayed a lot with Hilton and Marriott. Our room was flooded overnight on Dec 24th 2025. I woke up at around 4am to bad odor and 1 inch of water saturating the carpet. Our clothes were wet. Our computer and iPad was wet from being on the floor. So far the computer is working. Maintenance came in the morning. Manager will not be in until later in the day. There was no effort to move us into another room. We checked out early. Later that day manager left a voicemail stating that he is sorry for the inconvenience and they helped to check us out early. I was traveling with family and dog. This was Christmas Eve and we had to eat breakfast in the front public dining area. We wore partially wet clothes. All I asked was to comp our room for the day the room flooded and the manager could even do that. Manager said that they can’t refund rooms at Double Tree even with water damage and flooding. Even on the day the room got flooded, front desk said that manager will not be in until 1pm. This is a poorly managed hotel for Hilton/ double tree all the way down to the cleanliness, wall paper pealing to the mini fridge having no shelves. These were brought up to management even before the flooding of the room. Also the location is not very desirable with the hotel being on dimly lite street with people wheeling shopping carts at night. This Double Tree is not what you expect from this brand of hotel.

This was the worst stay we’ve ever had at a Doubletree hotel. We arrived at 2:30 pm hoping for early check-in if our room was ready. It wasn’t so we asked if we could get an estimate of when it would be. The response the front desk got was “between now and check-in.” Okay? That’s not helpful…We were on a time constraint so we opted to downgrade our room to one that was ready. My husband took a shower and the shower gel was completely empty. It took over 20 minutes for us to receive a refill. Next, the toilet was flushed once and completely overfilled and flooded the entire bathroom floor and the water seeped into our bedroom. We immediately brought up this problem to the front desk and was promised it would be dealt with ASAP. We had to leave and trusted this would be taken care. When we returned, we requested to be changed to a different room. Instead of being apologetic for the inconvenience, the front desk made us feel like we were the ones to blame for the flooding as apparently it leaked into the room below. It seems that the front desk and housekeeping has a disconnect because the flood was not addressed immediately as was promised to us. Although her intention may have been to investiagate what had happened, her customer service left us with a bad taste after our encounter. We got switched to a double room and boy is it due for a refresh; we noticed the couch was very worn out as there were cracks all over the cushion and the carpet was coming loose from the floor. We expected better quality and customer service from staying at a Doubletree hotel and this experience has made us wary of ever booking at Doubletree again.