SpringHill Suites by Marriott West Sacramento

The staff are friendly and attentive, and they’re doing what they can, but they look exhausted and there are noticeably very few of them. Marriott isn’t setting them up to succeed. This is about as good as West Sacramento gets, though that doesn’t make it “good.” The place looks nice at first glance, but everything feels cheap and uncomfortable. We ended up buying pillows and hand wash at Walmart. We’d asked for extra pillows and the staff were happy to bring them, but they weren’t to our taste. It feels like a late-stage capitalism, corporate greed cash grab. There are some useful features: the TV infotainment system has Netflix, HBO Max, YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Pluto, and nothing else. You can technically plug in an HDMI cable, but it has to go into HDMI2 on the controller box, not the TV, and there are no instructions. They’d obviously prefer you didn’t. The staff were good, and the mini fridge wasn’t stocked with things to buy, so we could actually use it. The water pressure is more than bad, it feels underbuilt for the building. You can tell when someone else turns on their shower because you lose 10-15 PSI, and the temperature swings around too. Be careful about setting the water hot, since it can randomly get hotter. It feels like the shower was designed to get you out fast. The room layout is weird. A 48-inch TV sits on a small swivel in the center, meant to turn toward the bed, desk, or couch, but its size and viewing angle make it uncomfortable to watch from anywhere. We moved the couch most nights. There’s very little storage for two people staying more than a few nights, especially in the bathroom. Thank goodness I don’t use many products or wear makeup, since there’d be nowhere to put anything. There’s no LAN Ethernet port for stable internet. The TV does have a LAN port, so with a travel router you might be able to connect and feed internet back to it, though they might have an alarm that tells them. Free Wi-Fi averaged 9Mbps down and 3 up; paid Wi-Fi averaged 28Mbps down and 7 up. One interesting thing, the first night the controlled access point, the internet sign-in page, wasn’t enabled. I got 130Mbps down without even signing in and thought, “good on you Marriott.” Nope, they fixed it lol. You’re not going to get any better in West Sac, and this is only barely better than the other options. They’ve got it down to a science. Bring whatever comforts from home you can, and don’t plan on relaxing in the room.