The Empress is wonderfully located, an easy walk to La Jolla Cove with restaurants, convenience stores, and shops all around. That part was excellent.
Breakfast covered the basics reliably: scrambled eggs, sausages, bread, coffee. Nothing fancy, but consistent. My only gripe was the juice selection: overly sweet mixes and no simple orange juice.
Where the stay stumbled was room maintenance. Our bathroom door lock did not work at check-in, and engineering had to fix it. The toilet’s flush leaked and later failed on our last day. The in-room safe would not open because the batteries ran low while our documents were inside. The iron left a black stain on my shorts the first time I used it, which suggests it was not cleaned after a previous guest. None of these alone would be a deal-breaker, but together they added up.
