The Bellevue Hotel Philadelphia Review

The Bellevue was our first hotel in Philadelphia, our next stop after Baltimore.

The Bellevue is a grand old hotel on Broad Street, now part of Hyatt’s Unbound Collection, which reopened following an extensive renovation in 2025. We booked through American Express Fine Hotels + Resorts. The history is obvious: a large stone exterior, marble and ornate detailing inside, old elevator surrounds, iron staircases and a huge internal atrium.

Our room was spacious, the hotel’s Sporting Club was on a whole different scale to most hotel gyms, and the two main bars and restaurants were very different from one another. We also had $175 of Fine Hotels + Resorts dining benefits to work through during a one-night stay, with some fairly specific rules about where they could be used.

We paid $489.64 for the room through American Express FHR.

That triggered the $300 semiannual FHR statement credit on the Platinum Card, reducing our eventual cash cost for the prepaid room to $189.64.

The reservation also came with the usual FHR benefits, including an upgrade when available, noon check-in when available and guaranteed 4pm checkout. More relevant to this particular stay were $75 of breakfast for two and a separate $100 food-and-beverage credit.

The Bellevue was quite specific about those last two. Both were for use at Pergola, the restaurant and bar on the 19th floor. The $100 credit expressly couldn’t be used at Mr. Edison, another bar off the lobby of the hotel.

Our upgrade resulted in a very spacious room with two beds. The room seemed particularly large given the amount of furniture in it. There were two beds, a long dresser and television, a table and two chairs, but still large areas of open floor. High ceilings and tall windows added to the sense of space.

Our windows faced the hotel’s enormous internal atrium rather than the city. We didn’t particularly miss the city view, and Pergola upstairs had plenty of those anyway.

The room’s coffee setup was fine. Pod machine, worked as intended and, unusually, no decaf pods taking up space in the selection. Good.

We knew the Bellevue had a fitness facility. I hadn’t appreciated what that meant until we went to have a look. The Sporting Club is massive.

It extends across multiple floors, with a huge gym, yoga rooms, an indoor running track and pickleball courts among what we saw. Apologies for the lack of images on that front. I didn’t take photographs inside the active exercise areas because people were using them, and frankly, I’m not comfortable photographing strangers working out just to illustrate a hotel review.

The information the hotel gave us subsequently put some more scale around what we’d seen. The Sporting Club also has a 25-meter four-lane lap pool, basketball and squash courts, golf simulators and a putting green, hot and cold plunge facilities, sauna and steam rooms, along with the more conventional gym facilities.

Access was included for hotel guests through the Bellevue’s destination fee. Calling this a particularly good hotel gym would undersell it. It’s a proper sporting club that happens to be accessible internally from the hotel.

We headed up to Pergola later in the day. Our stay included welcome drinks there, with sparkling wine and nonalcoholic cocktails among the options. We chose the sparkling, a blanc de blanc. It was decent, and at the normal menu price of $16 a glass, the two drinks represented $32 of something we were perfectly happy to consume.

So we stuck with it. We ordered the $26 shrimp cocktail with mango-habanero cocktail sauce, then ordered a second portion with another round of sparkling wine. Between that and the mandatory 18% service charge, we worked our way through the $100 FHR food-and-beverage credit. Having overfilled on the obligatory Philly cheesesteaks from Cleavers, a ten-minute walk from the hotel, at lunch, we didn’t need much more than that for dinner.

Pergola itself is a bright, open space on the 19th floor, very different from the historic public areas lower in the building. Large windows provide views across Philadelphia, and it was an easy place to spend an evening.

My wife isn’t always a morning person. I returned to Pergola the following morning alone.

Our FHR breakfast allowance was $75 for two people, and the 18% service charge counted toward that limit. Like the Park Hyatt DC breakfast we’d enjoyed a few days earlier, breakfast here was à la carte. I ordered for myself, then later added a lox bagel with cream cheese to take back to my sleeping-in spouse. The breakfast bill came to about $85 all-in, so we went roughly $10 beyond the stated allowance.

The final folio made the accounting clear. Rather than trying to reconcile every individual restaurant line against a particular benefit, the hotel showed the $100 food-and-beverage credit and $75 breakfast credit as separate credits against the overall bill.

That meant the full $175 was applied. The important distinction was that the $75 breakfast allowance included the 18% service charge, so it wasn’t $75 of menu prices before service. At the Park Hyatt Washington D.C. a few days earlier, we’d encountered different treatment of the breakfast allowance. The two hotels demonstrated that even within Hyatt, FHR breakfast benefits aren’t necessarily administered the same way.

Mr. Edison was a beautiful space. It’s much darker than Pergola and the bar menu seems to be primarily focused on cocktails.

Although Mr. Edison is in the hotel, our FHR $100 food-and-beverage credit couldn’t be used there. That benefit was specifically restricted to Pergola. We were made aware of this at check-in, so given our dining had been focused on Pergola, we had thought we might visit for lunch on the day of checkout. Unfortunately that was not to be as Mr. Edison did not open until around 5pm, which was well after checkout.

We thought we were going to have to give it a pass. But circumstances intervened.

When we arrived at the next hotel we realized we’d left an item in the safe at the Bellevue. I’ve never done that before, so felt a little sheepish to have to call the front desk and ask if we could return to recover it. We learnt something about hotel safes in this exercise.

Could we come pick it up? Sure. Did they need us to give them the PIN number for the safe to access it? No, maintenance at the hotel can access the safes without a PIN.

What? That was news. I suppose it makes sense that hotels need some way to recover the contents of a locked safe, but I’d never really thought about it. It does make me reconsider how much faith to put in a hotel-room safe elsewhere.

Decades on the road. I never knew that.

So back to the Bellevue we went. They had my item there which we collected without too much more fuss. But this time it was post 5pm and Mr. Edison was open.

We found a spot at the bar and enjoyed a glass of Prosecco each. While we had a front row seat to some fairly impressive cocktail mixology, we weren’t quite up for that ourselves at this point.

Given the inability to use the FHR credit there, I wondered whether Mr. Edison had an affiliate relationship with the hotel rather than being an in-house outlet. One way to test that would have been to use my Hyatt card and see how the charge posted, similar to my Hilton Aspire experiments. But in my hurry to get back for the valuables, I’d left that card at the next hotel. Never mind. I used the Amex Gold instead. The charge coded as “Global Restaurants” and earned 4x Membership Rewards.

The Bellevue also charged a $32 daily destination fee, reduced by $5 under the FHR Wi-Fi benefit. The hotel’s information sheet listed several things against that fee, including Sporting Club access, high-speed Wi-Fi, long-distance calls and the welcome cocktail or mocktail we’d enjoyed at Pergola. The two sparkling wines alone would normally have cost $32, against an effective $27 destination fee for our FHR stay. We didn’t use the impressive Sporting Club facilities beyond having a look around, but in our case the fee was at least easy to account for.

I still prefer hotels to put unavoidable charges into the room rate rather than create a separate fee and attach benefits to it, but in this case it didn’t really matter too much.

The final numbers also allow us to run the same accounting exercise we used for our Park Hyatt Washington D.C. stay. The room was $489.64, of which we ultimately paid $189.64 after the $300 FHR statement credit.

We incurred another $265.89 in hotel charges. After the $100 food-and-beverage credit and $75 breakfast benefit were applied, we paid $90.89 of those.

That put the total amount ultimately charged for the Bellevue at:

We also earned 2538 Membership Rewards points and 1990 Hyatt points from the stay. Using the same 1.5¢ working valuation for both currencies that I used for the Park Hyatt stay, we can make one further adjustment to the $280.53 charged to our cards:

As with other FHR calculations, that does not mean we somehow bought $755.53 of hotel, food and drinks for $213. The $300 statement credit was a benefit attached to a card with its own annual fee, and having dining credits available can influence what you spend in the first place.

Still, the ~$213 number can be useful as a consistent way of accounting for this stay and comparing it with other bookings, not just as a claim about how much we “saved.”

I really liked the Bellevue. The location was excellent, the room was spacious, and wandering through the old building, discovering just how extensive the Sporting Club was, sitting upstairs at Pergola with a glass of sparkling wine and then finding the completely different atmosphere at Mr. Edison made for a varied experience.

The FHR benefits worked cleanly. We naturally used the $100 Pergola credit, used the full $75 breakfast allowance the following morning and received a spacious upgrade. Once the statement credit and points earned are included using the same methodology as our other FHR stay, the effective net cost inclusive of dining came to ~$213.

But that’s the accounting rather than the reason I’d return. The Bellevue is an interesting hotel in its own right. The old building hasn’t been over-renovated into anonymity, and the Sporting Club gives it something genuinely unusual on top of that. The FHR economics make an already interesting property much easier to choose.

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