Il Prima Palace Hotel

This is my third or fourth stay at PP in the last several years, but I hadn’t been there since 2016. The physical facility remains the same as always - nice, well maintained, with a feel of “old Jerusalem”. The food also remains good, with the exception of some really bad fish we had at the third meal on Shabbat (the salmon was inedible because of so many bones and the herring tasted like it had gone bad). Beyond that, we had good food, and I agree with others that the food for the Shabbat meals is generally very nice. We also had a large nice room with a balcony on the third floor and despite a somewhat uncomfortable bed and pillows, it was still fine, and clean. The serious fall off from what I recall from our past stays is the staff. While the manager of the Shabbat meals was very friendly with a good customer orientation (as was the gentleman responsible for overseeing the Tisha B’Av break-fast), a number of his staff were unfriendly to surly. The same could be said about the front desk staff. As one example of the flawed staffing situation, the hotel bills its Friday night dinner as between 8:15 and 9:30 pm. Given that we wouldn’t even get back from Shabbat services until at least 9:00 pm, that a Shabbat dinner is supposed to be enjoyed slowly and peacefully, and that the price of the dinner is not inexpensive, we assumed the times were for seating, not serving. When we got there, one of the head people indicated that food would be removed at 9:30 pm. When I responded that that we weren’t even out of services until 8:45 (and that required that we leave early), he took on that combative attitude I mentioned above. I won’t bother here with the specific argumentative and angry comments he made because the manager came over to tell us not to worry, that we would have time. In the end, people were eating well past 10:30 pm, but what is supposed to be a warm and happy evening started off stressful. Most of the waitstaff never got friendlier, and when a cockroach (yes) crawled under my wife’s dinner chair, the staff person who came over loudly stomped on it with his foot and scowled at her to the point where she was genuinely scared (and she’s a strong independent businesswoman). I don’t remember PP staff being like this in the past, and it was bad enough that I can’t see returning. As nice as the hotel can be for Jewish visitors who keep kosher and the Shabbat, feeling unwelcome to disliked trumps that. The hotel chain management needs to seriously examine their staffing approach in this hotel.