I’m back at the Spencer again, because, inexplicably, my head office still chooses to book us here for work visits. I hope our rooms are free. So, this is a multi story hotel on Auckland’s North Shore. We as a nation are just coming out of a pandemic which decimated our tourism industry. Our national borders are about to fully open for the first time since Covid started. I last stayed here in 2017. My review of my last visit is a long and detailed description of the myriad failures of this hotel to meet its most basic expectations. Yet here I am again. I’ll keep it brief this time. Nothing about the hotel has changed since I was last here in 2017, except the staff. That and there’s currently no bar or restaurant due to ‘renovations’. So, room service is a microwave meal and over priced bottles of whatever alcohol you might choose from the limited selection available. Also, as I came back to my room, after being out all day, and finding my room unserviced, not visited by house keeping at all, I phoned housekeeping to ask why they hadn’t visited. It seems they don’t service your room until you’ve been here 3 days, apparently due to lack of staff, because of covid, but last time I was here, before covid, they didn’t service my room either. However, despite a lack of staff, who can’t service my room, because they don’t exist, due to covid or work visas, if I found an extra $35 a day, they COULD find some staff to make up my room. Which let’s face it fellow travellers, is a pretty basic expectation, to have your room serviced, when you are paying for hotel accommodation. But not at the Spencer, on Byron. So, dejected, thoroughly defeated by the utter indifference of a large, premium (for no good reason at all, except maybe, potentially, a nice view) Auckland hotel, to its valuable clients, corporate guests of a local company who give them a decent amount of repeat business, because the options locally, within walking distance of our head office are limited. Or frankly any human being who walked through the door, simply looking for accomodation somewhat approximating the amount they were expected to pay for it. I ordered one of the crappy microwave meals they called room service for 7:15pm. The only member of staff on duty arrived at my door at 7:05pm with my frozen microwave room service meal and over priced bottle of wine, in an expensive Auckland hotel, having travelled up in the lift, and walked through the hotel corridors, not wearing a mask. I had a few choice words about her hotel, hotel management, reassuring her it wasn’t her fault. I told her of my previously unsatisfactory experiences with the hotel and how now it’s inexplicably worse, rather than better, while reminding her it wasn’t her fault. That’s before I talk about the unsatisfactory, uncomfortable rooms, tired furniture, slow wifi, and frankly half ****d, and sub standard everything. On the single plus side. There’s possibly a good view of Auckland city o