Hotel Monaco San Francisco

As always an excellent warm welcome for our annual trip to San Francisco. From checking in early, to the wine and chocolates waiting in our room, to the happy anniversary upgrade from the hotel!
We love the hotel and stay here every year. I can’t imagine staying anywhere else. The staff have always been excellent, I can’t even find a complaint. Many of the staff members are the original members from 4 years ago when we started staying here. Daniel at the front desk is awesome. He emails a personal email to you the day of your stay to welcome you, and is there all day for you. The concierge, the cleaning staff, the door guys, the bar staff… Everyone! You can’t find fault. That is why we come back year after year, and will continue to do so.
Thank you again, you have one again out done yourself!

Cool rooms, great service. Attached BDK restaurant is pretty decent.
This is definitely a do over.

Had a fantastic stay at Hotel Monaco SF! Union Square is my preferred location to stay when I visit, but this was my first time at Monaco. The room was extremely comfortable and fit our needs perfectly. I will definitely visit here again. Also, the restaurant downstairs, BDK is fantastic and so convenient for us. We went a few times during our stay and never had to wait for a table. Thanks Hotel Monaco, see you soon!

Our stay here was incredible. An amazing experience. Gorgeous «modernish» hotel with excellent décor.
Location was perfect. We had no trouble getting around and walking to local hot spots. It was centrally located, as promised.
Good wifi.
Awesome gym that is open 24 Hours. Equipment is pretty good for casuals.
Incredibly friendly staff (Daniel was awesome) and service.
The restaurant was nothing short of fantastic. See my review of BDK.
Room was comfy and spacious for San Francisco standards. Very high ends and comfortable.
They have coffee and wine hours. Complimentary.
Keep it up!

I had an amazing experience at Hotel Monaco. I’ve stayed numerous times in SF in other hotels and Monaco is now my favorite hotel. The location is perfect and walking distance to many attractions. Additional pros:
— Free Wifi
— Happy Hour: complimentary wine & Massages
— Very clean rooms
— Modern décor
— Spacious rooms
— Friendly and professional staff
— Comfortable beds
The only negative I can think of is the overnight parking fee, $ 56. But that is normal in all SF hotels. So I wasn’t surprised.
I would recommended this hotel to my friends/​family.

A charming & sophisticated boutique hotel if your looking at staying close by Union Square, small clean stylish rooms and sweet friendly hotel staff that were absolutely helpful when we stayed! We even had our very own Queen & King robes, not sure if they do that any longer but I guess they knew the Queen & King were there… just kidding…:)
They did have room service when we stayed however I believe that seems to have stopped, but there are plenty of great eating spots that are walking distance. A nice little perk is the complimentary hosted evening wine hour & morning coffee and tea reception area, we did take advantage of this! They didn’t at the time have the lovely free bike service, but I am looking forward to that adventure when I return.
You get what you pay for and when your looking for a maintained charming small boutique hotel with a perfect location than Hotel Monaco is your stay!

No room service??? I don’t understand why they don’t have proper room service as a Kimpton. They have a restaurant that is attached to the hotel, BDK. The last time I stayed here they had room service and now they don’t. I really was looking forward to buckling down in my room and working while having room service. It is a perk of staying in a hotel, especially a Kimpton Hotel. It seems like a very process. Take the food from the restaurant, go to the elevator, go to the floor and deliver the food. I typically stay at Kimptons and this is a surprise. I think I would of made a different hotel decision tonight if I would have known this prior to staying here. Correcting this miss would have taken the rating from a three to a four.
Overall the room was nice and clean, the staff is friendly. I do like the hotel’s boutique feel. This month I have stayed about 8 – 9 nights in a Kimpton and will be staying the Portland location next week. Too bad this location was a disappointment.

I only stayed here once, but would stay here again if I could. It’s San Francisco, so the rooms are always going to be tiny… no matter what hotel you stay in. The staff was professional and pleasant. The price was a bit on the high side and the valet parking was, too. Again, it’s SF.
The perks for me were the free wifi and the great smelling amenities. I loved the smell of the lotion so much bcuz it’s masculine and feminine at the same time. I always feel bad for the guys when they had to put on foo-​foo lotion, but then again not many men put lotion on. I digress, the hotel is a great location to the point where u can walk to your dinner, but I would recommend doing it before dark since some shady characters were on the street. So, I made a mental note: don’t walk after dark unless I’m with my husband.

THEY WILL LOAN YOU AWESOME FREE BIKES
Seriously, it’s great. These aren’t the rickety pieces of crap that you get from the tourist traps. These are colorful, well-​maintained, practical bikes. You’re going to look very silly because the helmets and bicycles are colored very loudly but hey, at least you don’t look like a dumb tourist anymore.
The rooms are very clean and the lobby is pretty. I wound up going at a time when they had free wifi which is nice, but I get the impression that it isn’t available all the time.
Front desk staff is sweet. They have orange water in front of the elevators. The gym is adequate.
Also its a steal on Hotwire.

I was very unhappy with this hotel, especially for the price. It was around $ 500/​night and I will never stay here again. The staff was very friendly and the interior was clean and upscale which is why I gave it two stars instead of one.
The issues?
1) There’s no truly free WiFi. There is free WiFi, but you have to sign up for their club to be spammed. Even after that, it was too slow to load any pages. For $ 500/​night in THE BAY AREA, I would expect ultra fast free WiFi.
2) For an upscale hotel, the TVs are very small and have almost no channels. There’s something like 25 basic cable channels, and two of them are hotel programming, two of them are CSPAN, two are CNN and two are ESPN. I couldn’t even watch the Giants game because they didn’t have the local FOX affiliate and the bar downstairs for some reason has no TVs either.
3) THERE’S NO HOT WATER. You read that correctly. If you wanted to take a shower at midnight, it takes literally seven minutes for the water to heat up. Absolutely inexcusable.
4) The maid service sucks. For whatever reason, they would just leave dirty glasses if there was even a small amount of something in it. Makes no sense.

4a) I went to open the window and it was CAKED in dust and dirt. I dont think its been cleaned in years if ever. Not only is that gross, its probably not healthy to breathe that in.
5) While its not their fault, its in the ghetto and is pretty noisy with all the sirens going on.

The service was wonderful. Everyone was really helpful and friendly. The room was a nice size. Who goes to San Fran to sleep? There was definitely enough space for that. The rooms were also beautifully decorated. The beds weren’t too comfy, though. I didn’t get any sleep the first night. It felt a bit like I was lying on plastic. We moved to another room and the beds were a lot better.
Although we didn’t use them, I thought it was cool that they have bikes available to borrow. I’ll do that next time, for sure.
Austin was a joy. He was very attentive and seemed so happy to help everyone. I wanted to pack him in my suitcase and take him home! Lol :)

This is one of the better hotels I have stayed at in a really long time. They have the Boutique thing down. Cool funky vibe in the lobby with two fire places and couches aplenty lead you directly to the front desk where you will be treated better than most hotels around, for sure.
The room itself was spacious, clean, quiet and the towels never ran out (you know this has happened to you)…
They have a wine happy hour from 5 – 6 in the lobby and that was awesome. The wine was good and chilling in the lobby was pretty cool too.
Enjoyed my stay and will look to stay here again next time I am on the West Coast.

Exceptional customer service! My experience with Kimpton hotels have always been above and beyond.
I had made a reservation for Sir Francis Drake Hotel via
and the website had accidentally double-​booked so they sent me over to Hotel Monaco, another Kimpton hotel not too far away. They gave me $ 20 cash for cab fare for the inconvenience and SINCERELY apologized. And let me say, sincerity is rare in customer service! I even told the front desk I didn’t need the cab fare as I drove my car, and he said it was still ok for me to keep due to the inconvenience of switching hotels. How could I be mad, you know, I just got $ 20! Hell yeah!
I make my way over to Hotel Monaco and I check in. The representative finds out about the situation, and management comped my entire weekend stay! Everything I paid for which was about $ 400+ was refunded to me!
Wait, it gets better!
I get to my room, and there’s champagne and a fruit basket. I get super excited and I pop that bubbly. But then I notice, there’s a card in this fruit basket addressed to somebody else. So I’m like sweating now and I’m tripping hard thinking oh shoot am I in somebody else’s hotel room?!? I call the front desk and I let them know of the situation, and dude, this dude that comped my stay, this dude – MY DUDE, was like don’t worry about it, enjoy!
The hotel is gorgeous, room was amazing, and the free wine hour was a big plus!!!
LIKE A BOSS, thank you Hotel Monaco.

The first of many Kimpton Hotels I’ll be visiting and an enjoyable experience at that.
After getting an outstanding rate on Hotwire, I booked a five night stay at Hotel Monaco. My timing was fortuitous because, as the cabbies indicated, the fancy fruit convention was coming down and room rates were expected to triple. Note to self: if you’re a Kimpton Karma Rewards member, you can only rack up points for stays booked directly through Kimpton. Second note to self: Kimpton will match the lowest listed room rate you find using any of the big travel sites.
The room was posh and funky albeit a little on the small side. I was generally impressed with the staff manning the front door, desk, and wine/​breakfast serving areas. I would have been more impressed if they had told me that BART doesn’t start running on Sundays until 8:00am before I dragged a ton of luggage down to Union Square. Oh, well. Nobody’s perfect.
While I wouldn’t choose to stay at the edge of Union Square and the Tenderloin myself, my company’s San Francisco office is right around the corner making this an ideal location next time I’m in town.

A solid four stars for Hotel Monaco! This place is clean, comfortable, and so beautifully decorated (if you’re into pattern-​mixing – if not, you might get a headache).
The room was a little small, and I would have rather stayed there by myself instead of with my husband. That came out wrong. I mean to say that it’s great for solo business travelers.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a coffee maker in the room, but coffee was provided for a few hours every morning in the super stylish lobby.
But I really appreciated the wine (or spiked cider) at happy hour!
WiFi is free if you join their rewards program.

Decent Boutique Hotel with Modern Décor
Pros
–Hotel has a lot of FREE stuff (Wi-​Fi, Breakfast, Happy Hour, Bikes)
–Clean
–Nice staff
–Great working area in the room
–Location
Cons
–Bed was not that great and squeaky, my back was not happy
–Towels had a bad gym laundry smell
–Tiny gym with little equipment

After my somewhat disappointing stay at the Hotel Palomar San Francisco, I felt a bit uneasy about staying at another Kimpton in San Francisco. In May of this year, I needed to stay a night over in San Francisco, and decided to try another Kimpton property out and see if my experience would be better… and it was!
Hotel Monaco is located in downtown San Francisco in the Union Square/​Tenderloin area. Granted this area typically has a lot of foot traffic, the Hotel Monaco was not too noisy. That in itself was a blessing for me since I’m a light sleeper… so the Hotel Monaco gave me the location I wanted without the typical SF music/​noise. At check-​in, the front desk staff friendly, helpful, and accommodating. After my experience at Hotel Palomar, I was kind of expecting that I probably wouldn’t get an any sort of upgrade, even with Inner Circle Status. But to my pleasant surprise, I did get an upgrade, which was very nice.
I was upgraded to the junior suite, which while being a suite, was still kind of the smaller side (hence the name, junior) but still larger than the room that I had originally booked. No complaints here though since I was very thankful for the upgrade. The junior suite came with both a king-​sized bed and a queen-​sized sleeper sofa located in a corner recess of the room. The bathroom was a standard bathroom with nothing to write home about. Bath products were from the Kimpton line of CO Bigelow.
Overall, a good, solid typical Kimpton experience. I’d definitely stay again here if I needed to stay in downtown SF for any reason. Of note, Hotel Monaco usually has pretty good rates for AAA, government, and usually participates in Kimpton last minute deals promotions… so if you want to stay here, look out for those deals!

Overall look of the hotel is nice but here’s what went wrong with my stay.
Hotel front desk guy asks for a credit card. I hand over my debit card and he says «Oh its a debit card we will have to put a $ 200 hold on it for the time of your stay.» I say «Ok. If I give you a regular credit card will I have a hold? (As I extend my credit card)» he says «Oops sorry I already ran your card.»
At this point I’m a little annoyed but whatever its just for the weekend so I go with it. I leave for brunch with my friend and I check my bank statement to see he actually charged $ 550 on my card. When I get back to the hotel I point out the issue and he says «Oh yeah it looks like I accidentally overcharged you.» I asked if he could fix this, refund and just use my credit card instead he says «Well I would have to make a few phone calls and be on the phone to reverse the charges and it would take quite awhile to process but if you really need the money right away I can do that.» He was pretty apathetic and just seemed to not really want to fix the problem. I was pretty annoyed but I also had very limited time in the city and I didn’t want to spend an hour or who knows how long it would take to fix a problem he made.
Anyway, I check out Monday and see my funds are still in possession of the hotel. I contact front desk and explain the situation to another woman. She explains it may take til Wednesday (3 days after my stay) or at the very latest Friday (a week from when I checked in.) Lucky me I was NOT refunded until that Friday. WTF?!?
Oh. Also their «Business Center» for guests is complete bullshit. It costs $ 5 just to use the damn computer for the minimum requirement of 5 minutes. We had an issue printing a ticket which resulted of $ 15 worth of computer time. All other hotels I stayed at from small boutique to large resorts allowed their guests complimentary use of the business center. The bathrooms also don’t have a fan/​vent either.
Anyway I won’t be staying here again. The lack of care and concern when I’m charged more than double the hold amount left a bad taste in my mouth.

How is this a 4 star hotel? I really don’t get it. This place is not particularly nice, with worn carpeting, fixtures, and linens.
The «continental breakfast» consists of some store bought pastries and random fruit juice in which you must produce a computer printed ticket as proof of eligibility (though I’m not sure who would be sneaking in to eat this junk).
I did not have one fitful night of sleep here as I was woken up multiple times by disturbing loud noises (of which I’m not sure what they were). I was also woken up by a maid loudly knocking on my door at 7:30 AM, which was equally unpleasant.
I get hotels in SF generally leave something to be desired (at least in my experience) but this is one I definitely do not feel compelled to try again on a future visit.

Excellent everything!!!
In 2013 we stayed at Hotel Monaco for the first time to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Upon arriving to our suite, there was chilled champagne waiting for us along with a handwritten card signed by staff members to wish us a Happy Valentine’s Day. We had a minor issue with our heat not working that night but extra blankets were promptly delivered to us and all was fine.
This year, we went back to Hotel Monaco to celebrate Valentine’s Day for the second year in a row. We celebrated late, in March, but since the hotel knew we were celebrating Valentine’s Day they still treated it as if we weren’t late at all! Again, we received chilled champagne and a lovely handwritten note. Each time we visited the front desk we were wished a Happy Valentine’s Day. It was so sweet!
I will elaborate on our most recent stay since the details are still fresh in my mind. When we arrived, it was pouring rain. A bellman quickly came to greet me with an umbrella while I grabbed my belongings from the trunk of the car. Our check-​in was as smooth as can be and our room was a lovely Mediterranean Suite with a jacuzzi tub. At 5PM we took part in the hosted wine hour (which we had not done in the past) and relaxed in front of one of the lovely fire places.
Kimpton hotels are pet-​friendly but if you’re traveling pet-​free you can actually request a goldfish during your stay! We tried this for the first time and named our fish «Jupiter.» I have to admit although the idea was neat, I felt a little sorry for our new friend. He seemed frightened and stressed out :(
Our bed was extremely comfortable. I usually don’t notice these things unless I’m UNcomfortable but I actually thought to myself «wow, this bed is SOOOO comfortable!»
All in all our stay was pleasant with a capital «P.» The beautiful hotel ambiance, the amazingly friendly and helpful staff, our gorgeous suite — it was all great. Thank you so much Hotel Monaco!!!
PS — Be sure to sign up for Kimpton’s InTouch Loyalty program for awesome perks! ;)

Hotel Monaco is a Kimpton Hotel located in the Union Square area. Whenever I travel I always look out for Kimpton Hotels because I know I will get a great room for reasonable price. Being an InTouch member also gives me the opportunity to earn points for perks.
Well since I was planning on a hassle free trip I decided to book here in Union Square since it was located close to everything that I wanted to see. Kimpton is known for their modern décor and pet friendly rooms.
I called ahead to let them know that we would be arriving late because of the crash that had occurred at SF airport and were forced to arrive by train. They were very welcoming on the phone and let me know that they would do everything they could to make our check-​in easy and asked if there was anything that they could do for me.
When we arrived check-​in was a breeze and we went straight up to our room and plopped right onto their comfy beds!
The décor in the room was awesome, comfy chair in the sitting area, and an oversize mirror that I really loved.
Every morning we were delivered the local newspaper and housekeeping did a wonderful job making our stay as comfortable as possible.

I also made it into the gym they have located in the lower level of the hotel a couple times.
Being an InTouch member we received $ 10 from the minibar, 20%off Spa services and free wifi! I definitely enjoyed my stay here and look forward to our next trip to SF!
Don’t forget to sign up for their free InTouch program for perks!!!