Day 3: ThursdayDue to the chaos the night before, we all woke up very late. It was 10:00 and the kids were still sleeping. My wife and I were ready and breakfast was closing at 10:30 so we woke up the kids and went down.
Breakfast was the same and was great again.
Plan for today was to swim until 2, shower the kids and head to Jerusalem.
The kids did not want to leave the pool and after having a light lunch of fruit, french fries and bread (no dairy by the pool) we dragged them out.
They gave us 4 PM late checkout without any issues (probably due to the disaster the night before).
At this point the elevators were still not working and the bellman literally had to carry my luggage up to the 9th floor and go to the other tower to bring them down. It took a really long time to get out.
We headed to Jerusalem and due to traffic it took us close to 2 hours. Now i was getting better at taxis and it cost only 300 shekel for an SUV.
We finally arrived at the famous WAJ. First of all I have to say that reception to the hotel is great! They greeted us nicely, offered us cold water and quickly emptied the Taxi.
I am a diamond member with Hilton and was hoping for a decent upgrade. I was pre-upgraded in the app to a King deluxe with a balcony so I figured that it wouldn't be too hard to get upgraded further. Boy was I wrong. The check in agent who didn't seem too competent tells me I see you are booked in a superior room. I say yes any chance I can get a diamond upgrade? He says let me check and does some BS looking (as I already know from the app that I was blocked in a King deluxe with a balcony) he says yes I can give you a king deluxe with a balcony, I say oh wow, any chance you can do something better as I have my kids with me. He tells me let me check with my manager.
He comes back and says Ok I can give you a JR suite but you need to pay $250 a night. I tell him you're nuts ( I didn't actually say that I was just thinking it) I'll just stick with my original room, maybe for the King David suite I would pay that much. Now he says, your reservation was for 1, you only get 1 free companion I am going to have to charge you $130 a night per kid anyway so this is a better deal. I tell him these kids are young I am not booking them a separate room and I am trying to bargain him down to $100 a night extra but he wont budge. The manager claims it is really supposed to be $300 but I will honor the mistake that the agent made for $250. I tell him shouldn't a JR suite be included in the Diamond upgrades and he tells me they only give a 2 category upgrade. Anyway I decided I would just book another room and go for connecting rooms instead of paying $250 a night for a JR suite. He goes to look at my reservation and it turns out he knows my family and they have booked tons of rooms at the WAJ and he says Ok I will give you the JR suite for $100 a night. Now I started pushing to get it for free but that was a no go.
I was exhausted after all this back and forth so I gave up! Spoiler alert I was not charged for the upgrade at checkout!
We got to the room and I already had a sour taste in my mind. I hate being nickel and dimed for an upgrade. I totally get that they wont upgrade if its not available, but if its there it is just poor taste in my mind. I have gotten far better upgrades for free. Again i am not the entitled type but after speaking to a bunch of people who stayed here and said that they never had issues it really sat wrong with me that I had to go through this. / end rant
Anyway the room was large and had a pullout couch so it was great! I was definitely not amazed though and would have killed myself if I had to pay $250 a night extra for this room. but it would serve the purpose for our 3 nights.
It was late and we had the Kotel Tunnel Tours scheduled for 8:40 PM so we ran down to the restaurant to grab a quick meat Dinner. Food was Ok and not great at all. Again I was told that it was OK to eat anything here, but please do not rely on me. We tried to eat as quickly as possible and at 8:20 we were outside looking for a taxi.
Mushroom appetizer
Kids Meal
Regular Burger NOT kids meal
Salmon
Apparently they were having something called the festival of lights and the taxi driver was not willing to take us as the streets were closed. We had to walk and there was a ton of traffic and we did not make it until 9:15. But it was scenic and we got to see the lights! This was the last night of the festival so great timing!
I'm not exactly sure what I am looking at here but it looks pretty cool
Luckily they let us catch up to our tour guide so we saw everything and only had to listen to him babble for the last 15 minutes. based on the last 15 minutes we were happy that we came late!
it took a while to get back to the hotel, we finally did and went to sleep. We had to wake up early the next morning as it was our only full (non-Shabbat) day in Jerusalem and we wanted to do as much as possible.