Pros: Location. A block away off the Magnificent Mile, North Side near the John Hancock building. The North Side of Chicago downtown is the nicer & safest part of downtown Chicago. Also has more restaurants and shopping centers within close walking proximity than the south part of downtown Chicago/or the loop. We were are from San Diego, CA, it was our first time visiting Chicago, we are definitely going back (much nicer & easier to get around than NY).
Cons: We will definitely stay in the North side of town again, but definitely never booking the Whitehall ever again & we are never prepaying for a hotel ever again, unless we have stayed there in the past & we already know what we are booking. Had we not prepaid for the hotel we would have checked out & booked another hotel. We Checked in at around 2pm Dec 26th for a 6 night stay. First room we got on 8th floor modern decor but was not as the one we expected from the pictures, it was a 3star room because the bathroom was big & definitely worthy of a 4star, but room was not. Even in the dim light we could see the walls & furniture were old, once we used our cell flash lights to see better in the room, the walls were scary. And there was a wall just 2 ft away from our window, so even in the day no natural light came in. we tried it for a few hrs but we felt like we were being enclosed & we had 7 days to go & we were there on our 10th yr wedd annv. So at around 7pm, we called front desk, Rebecca was super nice, we requested if we could get a room that was not facing a wall, just something that had a view to the outside world. We got mover to room on the 19th floor, bathroom was small, but room was bigger in size, but worse in décor & condition. Traditional décor, but not in a good way, even more older furniture and walls than first room, & bed frame & fixtures had a layered of dust, as if no one had cleaned it in 10yrs. And I found a woman's sweater and hair wig in the closet. Lets just say the only area I felt okay to get undressed was the bathroom as this was the only 4star worthy part of the room.The only reason why we stayed in this new room is because the room was a corner room away from the main hallway, which seemed a lot safer, being that this hotel did not seem safe at all & the hallways & elevator are super narrow & small & seem taken out of an episode from the "Twilight Zone". Hallway walls are old & musky, elevator even had tagging, I never stay at a hotel that's less than 3stars, never had seen this type of condition in any of the hotels I have stayed. And in past 10yrs we have vacation 2-3 times a yr. Not sure how they have manage to keep a 4star rating. The only 4star worthy of this hotel is the bathrooms in rooms, hotel restaurant, & hotel staff. Rebecca gave us a nice letter and vouchers (we only used the breakfast voucher) to apologize for the hair wig & sweater, but the damage was more than done. We had a hard time even being in our hotel room, before our trip we had originally planned to spend more time relaxing in hotel, but definitely we ended up trying to be out of our hotel as much as possible. If they had 4star rooms elsewhere in the hotel, then we did not stay in one, which again does not make this a 4star hotel because a 4star hotel should have all rooms in 4star condition starting from their smallest deluxe rooms all the way up to their suites. Unacceptable, if anything they are a 2 1/2 to 3star hotel.