Gateway Hotel & Suites, Ascend Hotel Collection

We stayed at the Gateway for three nights to attend the Boardwalk Rock festival in May and had a wonderful experience. The rooms are well kept, updated, and clean, and have the added benefit of a mini fridge. Staff was helpful and courteous. Free parking, though spaces are tight. Perfect location to the boardwalk and for walking to the festival, as well as for local restaurants and shops (less than five minutes to walk anywhere).

I would love to give this hotel more stars, but I cannot until they change their glaring balcony lights that made our family vacation a nightmare.

Every single room’s balcony light at this hotel has literal FBI floodlight strength and there is NO way to turn it off. The rooms do have decent room darkening curtains, but they are NO match for the brightness of these balcony lights.

As we went to bed with our 2-year-old daughter she didn’t want to sleep because it looked like it was DAYLIGHT OUTSIDE due to alllll the light streaming through every inch around the curtains. (There’s 2 big windows AND a window on the door to the balcony too.) Our daughter was up from 1:30-4:30am(!!!!) unable to sleep again because it was just so bright. It was hard for me to sleep and I wear a sleep mask!!!!

We contemplated just cutting our beach vacation short and going home the next day because this situation was SUCH a nightmare and we were so miserable. I called the front desk in the middle of the night begging for any type of solution and he said there’s no way to turn it off. He said he has heard this complaint before and people tie a dark hoodie around the light to try to help. !!!! Why has this complaint been made multiple times before and no one is doing anything about it??? We didn’t have any dark clothing to tie around it. We put some hand towels around it in desperation, but it didn’t do anything to help of course.

Imagine our joy of facing the next day of our vacation as zombies with a 2-year-old that barely slept the night before. :/ Not how we envisioned our relaxing family vacation.

The next day we wasted our time going around the beachfront trying to find an actually cheap (cuz those $5.99 signs are false) black shirt or whatnot to cover the light and then my husband had to make a special trip to a store to buy some duct tape. All things we should NOT have to be worrying about doing during our vacation, but we knew we had no choice if we wanted to stay and be able to sleep. We got the balcony light outside thickly covered with towels and a dark shirt, extra blankets hung over the curtain rods inside, and then duct taped every inch of the curtains down and finally got a good night’s sleep. Again, it is so wrong to have guests to have to be doing things like this just to get sleep.

When I talked to Carol, who is wonderful, about the situation the next morning she told us what other people do - wrap a hoodie around the light and try their best to sleep. So she has heard the complaint many times before as well as the employee I spoke with in the middle of the night has heard it before - please do something!!

Because otherwise this hotel is great. Most beach hotels I’ve stayed at are dingy and dilapidated, but these rooms looked put together and clean. The rooms are priced right and the location is fantastic.

Just please, please fix the balcony light situation so that your guests can get some sleep.

Wonderful hotel for our visit. It's clean with on-site parking for guests. Be cautioned it is a very tight squeeze parking lot space. We had a small terrace that was fun to sit on and relax. Plus, it's a bonus of being a short walking distance from the beach without having the on the beach price. It is a great price for being this close to the beach. I felt it was quiet for having been so close to the crowds of people. We preferred to stay here this trip and if we return we may stay for longer than one night.