Wyndham Melbourne on William Street in the CBD.
We came to Wyndham Melbourne directly after several days at Club Wyndham Denarau in Fiji, which made for an interesting comparison. Both stays came from the same Wyndham timeshare ownership, but they could hardly have felt more different.
Denarau is a resort where the property is a large part of the trip. Melbourne was almost the opposite. We had apartments in a central location, went out into the city every day, ate extremely well within a few minutes’ walk and mostly used Wyndham as a comfortable base to come back to.
There isn’t an enormous amount more complicated than that to say about it. It worked. For this particular trip, that was what we needed.
The apartments
Our apartments had proper living areas and fully equipped kitchens.
Our family group occupied several Wyndham apartments across the first three floors and, unlike in Fiji, everyone had their own room. I was on Level 1, while the rest of the family was spread across Levels 2 and 3, which gave me a chance to see several different apartments. There were slight differences between them. One might have a somewhat larger living room, bedroom or kitchen than another, but there wasn’t enough variation that I’d have been particularly concerned about which one I received.
The apartments varied slightly in size and layout.
The setup is recognizably Wyndham. These are proper apartments rather than hotel rooms with a microwave squeezed into a cabinet. The kitchen is fully operational and comes with tea, hot chocolate, and instant coffee, but otherwise you’re largely left to your own devices.
The kitchen came with tea, coffee, milk and a welcome bottle of wine.
That distinction can be quite useful on a multi-day stay. Melbourne has far too much good food to make cooking dinner in the apartment particularly appealing to me, but having a refrigerator and a real kitchen gives you options that a normal hotel room doesn’t.
The bedroom in my apartment.
The apartments were comfortable and in good condition, with enough space that we actually used the living areas rather than treating them simply as somewhere to sleep.
The bathroom had a walk-in shower and wall-mounted toiletries.
The bathroom followed the same pattern: modern, straightforward and perfectly adequate. If you’re looking at the photographs wondering if there isn’t some hidden layer of five-star luxury that I’m failing to describe, there isn’t. What you see is pretty much what we got.
My Level 1 apartment also had a large outdoor area.
My apartment had a reasonably large outdoor area and faced directly toward the Supreme Court of Victoria across William Street. It’s a lovely heritage building and a rather better outlook than I would have expected from a fairly ordinary city apartment.
The Supreme Court of Victoria directly across William Street.
The view also gave the apartment a strong sense of place. Melbourne does the juxtaposition of nineteenth-century architecture and modern towers particularly well, and it was all sitting immediately outside the window.
Not a bad outlook from the terrace.
Understanding the building
Club Wyndham and The William occupy different parts of the same building.
The building itself takes slightly more explaining.
Not all of it is Wyndham timeshare accommodation. The remaining apartments operate as The William, and although there are shared facilities, the two parts are largely kept separate. They even have different elevator banks: Wyndham occupies primarily lower floors, while The William uses the floors above.
My Level 1 apartment put me at the point where the two worlds overlap.
The William lobby, which my Level 1 key also gave me access to.
This, for example, is The William lobby rather than the Club Wyndham lobby. My Level 1 key allowed me into it because guests from both sides of the building need access to the shared facilities on that floor. There was another card-operated door separating the Wyndham accommodation wing itself, preventing The William residents from simply wandering through.
The directional signs make more sense with that context. Standing near the building entrance, The William reception is off in one direction while Club Wyndham guests are directed toward their own part of the property.
It sounds considerably more confusing written down than it was in practice. Once we’d worked out which elevator went where, I barely thought about it again.
The facilities
The Level 1 gym is shared between Wyndham and The William.
The Level 1 gym is one of the facilities shared between the two sides. I didn’t use the gym myself on this visit, but it seems to have the equipment you’d expect from a city apartment property and was getting continual use from residents during our stay.
One of the communal seating areas in the building.
There are also communal spaces around the building. They’re pleasant enough, although this isn’t somewhere I’d choose because I wanted a hotel with an elaborate club lounge or a lot happening inside it.
The most substantial amenity is upstairs.
The rooftop pool overlooking the Melbourne CBD.
There’s an outdoor pool on the top floor, surrounded by a deck with loungers and views across the Melbourne skyline.
We didn’t use it. We had just come from Fiji, where spending time around a pool was considerably more compelling, and Melbourne was largely jacket weather during our stay. There were nevertheless a handful of people swimming when I went upstairs to have a look. It is a nice facility to have, particularly in summer. On this trip there wasn’t much contest between getting into an outdoor pool and getting back out into Melbourne.
The location was the real amenity
Looking out across the CBD from one of the communal areas.
Wyndham is on William Street in the CBD, and the location worked exceptionally well for us. The nearest tram stop was about a block away at William and Bourke Streets. Once we’d worked out Melbourne’s free central tram system, we used it constantly to move around the city.
The convenience extended to things I hadn’t planned on needing. A dental problem I’d developed in Fiji still needed attention, so I found a dentist about a block and a half from Wyndham and was given an appointment with roughly five minutes’ notice. That’s obviously not a reason to choose a hotel, but it says something about the usefulness of staying in the middle of a proper working city.
Food was an even better demonstration. I’ve lived in New York for many years and understand the Darwinian nature of restaurants there: with that much competition, mediocre places don’t have an easy time surviving. Melbourne gave me a similar impression.
Around Wyndham, everything we tried was good. We found a nearby café for breakfast where the quality was high but the speed was almost more memorable. Tailored cooked breakfasts appeared within minutes of ordering. There seemed to be Korean chicken-and-beer places everywhere, and the one we tried didn’t disappoint. On our final night we ate at a Thai restaurant around the corner and had some of the more interesting fusion dishes I’ve encountered coming from a Thai base.
And then there was our “local”.
Bar Humbug, around the corner on Little Bourke Street, became our local for a couple of nights.
Bar Humbug, around the corner on Little Bourke Street, became the place we stopped for a nightcap on a couple of evenings. On the final visit we happened across an open-mic comedy night. The concept was almost perfect: much of it was so awful that it became good again. We had a lot of fun.
The useful thing about all of this is that none of these were carefully researched Melbourne dining expeditions. They were simply the places immediately around where we were staying. We hadn’t yet started exploring the city’s better-known restaurants.
The Club Wyndham bit
Steakhouse Grill 66, on the ground floor of the building.
There is another element to staying through Club Wyndham that won’t apply to somebody simply booking an apartment in the building. Steakhouse Grill 66, on the ground floor of the building, was connected to one of the Club Wyndham marketing offers during our stay. Attend a roughly 90-minute meeting and breakfast was included, along with a $100 voucher that could be used at the steakhouse and possibly elsewhere.
Most of our group decided that we’d rather keep the 90 minutes.
My sister took the other side of the trade. She had breakfast, listened to the presentation, collected the $100 voucher and then spent it downstairs at the restaurant. The rest of us joined her and paid cash.
One of the lines from the presentation was that the representatives were no longer paid on commission and therefore weren’t incentivized to exert the sort of sales pressure people might associate with timeshare presentations. She listened to the spiel, took the voucher and that was essentially that.
My parents are heavily involved with Wyndham, have reached its 100 Club level and get a great deal of use from what they own. Wyndham is the principal framework through which they travel, in part because they don’t have access to the same range of US credit-card points and miles tools that I do.
Their ownership has also proved considerably more flexible than simply returning to the same resort every year. It has produced stays here in Melbourne, at Wyndham Sea Pearl Phuket and other travel options including river cruises, although Denarau remains at the center of how they use it.
Melbourne was another good example of why the arrangement works for them. It gave a large family group several apartments in the middle of the city, while everyone could come and go independently. The sales presentation was optional. We treated it that way.
Melbourne took over
The Supreme Court of Victoria from my apartment at night.
What I remember about the stay consequently isn’t spending much time at Wyndham.
We saw A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond musical, went looking around AC/DC Lane and Melbourne’s other street-art areas, headed down toward the docks and the outlet mall, and ate all over the center of the city. We also discovered that taking the tram to Batman Park produces considerably less excitement than the name might lead an unsuspecting visitor to expect.
That’s probably the best argument I can make for Wyndham Melbourne. It isn’t a hotel I’d tell somebody to visit because the property itself is an essential Melbourne experience. The apartments aren’t luxurious enough to make that case, the facilities aren’t unusual enough, and we weren’t remotely interested in sitting around the building when there was a city outside.
But put several adults into their own apartments, give them proper kitchens and living space, put them a block from the free tram network and surround them with very good places to eat and drink, and the proposition starts looking considerably better.
Wyndham Melbourne gave us somewhere easy to live for several days while we got on with Melbourne. For this trip, it didn’t need to do anything more.
Club Wyndham Denarau Fiji (to come)
While We Were There: Melbourne’s Street Art (to come)