Hotel Carlton

The worst experience I’ve had. No cleaning, no clean towels, no toilet paper. Be ready. If you have one or two nights it can work.

We stayed here twice a few weeks apart, at the start and end of a big road trip. Overall we liked the hotel. It was a little slow getting checked in both times, and the "room key" arrangement is slightly annoying (they email you a code that you enter on a keypad on your room door. the system works fine per se, but EVERYONE at the check-in desk is a foreign traveler with no local 5G, so it's a tortuous process watching them have to log onto the hotel wifi to get their email, etc etc.) Anyway, once that's done we found the rooms to be clean and well appointed. There's no desks, which is odd in a hotel room. Even the most basic motels tend to have a little work space where you can sit with a laptop or whatever. It didn't bother me but maybe wouldn't suit business travellers. But it's quite a stylish place and it was spotless, so that's half the battle. As for the area: we honestly found it totally fine. We walked to nearby bars and restaurants and felt completely safe. Before travelling we read a lot about the prevalence of homelessness in SF. Well a few blocks away I think there are some places you'll see that in high concentrations, eg Eddy St, Turk St, although we didn't encounter it anywhere near this hotel. (Conversely we did see a lot of homeless people in the Mission district, and the cab driver who took us there told us in a serious voice "be careful".) Also we had read a LOT of horror stories about car break-ins and our hire car was a very conspicuous one (a silly convertible mustang with racing stripes... i know, i know...) but we parked it in the parking garage a few blocks away from the Found hotel, on California street, and collected it later with no issues. So yeah, travelling anywhere requires some common sense, but we felt the pearl-clutching we had read re SF was very overblown. tl:dr We'd have no hesitation in coming to stay here again.