Ethel M Chocolates Factory

Pros: Empathetic frontline staff who tried their best under pressure, renovated Ipanema room. Cons: 2 hr check-in delay, system outage requiring handwritten credit cards, misleading Expedia pricing, broken ice machines, elevator delays. My stay was a highly frustrating mix of great frontline service and total operational failure. Booking through Expedia was incredibly misleading; the price I was promised online was entirely different from what I was forced to pay upon arrival, resulting in unexpected extra charges at the desk that felt like being double-billed. The check-in process itself was a complete nightmare. The entire system went down, and the lobby turned into a massive bottleneck. The self-service kiosks were useless, and the front desk staff had to manually process arrivals using a pen-and-paper backup system, handwriting credit card information and hard copies just to get people into rooms. Because of this tech failure, I had to wait roughly two hrs just to check in. Once finally past the desk, getting to the room was a chore due to painfully long elevator wait times. I stayed in the renovated Ipanema Tower. While the room was modern, basic maintenance is failing—the ice machine on my level was broken, forcing me to haul a bucket to a completely different floor just to get ice. The absolute saving grace of this hotel is its frontline staff. The employees are incredibly polite, friendly, and did their absolute best to remain patient while dealing with management