|
First
off, let me tell you that I am not rich, but I am not cheap either.
I have traveled all over the world and stayed in some of the nicer
hotels available and I’ve stayed in some dumps as well.
Once on a trip with my family back from Washington D.C. we stopped
in New Orleans and the only motel we could find available rented
rooms by the hour so you have an idea of what this place was like.
On the other hand I’ve stay at the Waldorf and the Plaza in New
York, the Ritz in Paris and five star hotels in London.
Generally you expect better service and treatment for the expensive
hotels. As they say… “You pays your money and you takes your chances.”
What you don’t expect is to pay through the nose and then get below
average service and treatment.
Such was our plight last week. My wife signed us up for a promotional
five day, four night mini-vacation in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
We got a good deal on the room, from a large well known hotel chain,
with an additional $100 gift card. So far, so good.
We arrive in
Denver, and then have to take a four hour shuttle ride to get to
the hotel. No big deal. Our room is at the end of the hall next
to the maid’s chamber, but on a promotional trip, I don’t expect
to get a choice suite or the best location in the house. I do expect
a clean room with regular service. Out of the three full days we
were there, our room was cleaned once. We did get clean towels each
day, but that’s it. The shower was moldy and the carpet was stained,
but I can live with that if the room is cleaned, which it wasn’t.
On our first
full day there (Friday) we call down in the morning for room service
since we had gotten in so late the night before. No answer. Finally
the front desk answers and tells us the restaurant is too busy to
take any more orders, and they will tell them to call us back within
the hour. No call. We get dressed. I call housekeeping to tell them
that we would like our room cleaned early since we planed to read,
relax and sleep. We don’t ski.
I tell the
maids in the hall also to clean the room. We go off to breakfast.
Two scrambled eggs and a box of Cheerios for each of us for breakfast…$42.86.
We go back
upstairs, room isn’t clean. I ask the maids again and call housekeeping
again. At noon we go back downstairs to another restaurant, hamburger
and a salad...$55.00. Back upstairs, no luck. My wife gets sick
from the hamburger and goes to sleep. About 5pm, the maid wants
in to clean, and we take the towels and tell her to forget it. I
call the manager who assures me that the room will be cleaned the
next morning between 9am and 10am.
The next morning
(Saturday) we go into town for breakfast, do some shopping and sight
seeing and return about 1pm. No maid service. Call the manager,
but he doesn’t work on Saturdays so his assistant has the maids
come over and clean while we go sit in the lobby for an hour.
In the meantime, I keep getting calls from the guy who handed me
the $100 gift card. It seems I am supposed to sit down for some
tour of their new condo sites and real estate offers. There is nothing
on any of the letters concerning the gift card that ties the gift
card into any type of real estate offer.
Saturday evening, my wife is feeling better but not up to going
out for dinner. We order a ham and cheese sandwich and some quesadias
and two cans of soda….this time the charge is $61.38. Now I don’t
mind paying big prices for good food, but a greasy ham and cheese
sandwich, with a handful of chips and a pickle slice is hardly gourmet
food. This is one star food or what you get at truck stops. No,
that’s wrong I’ve had better food than this at truck stops. We turn
on the television for the first time and want to watch a movie,
but the TV is broken. They send a guy up to fix it, nice guy, takes
him over an hour, now we can watch movies, but the reception is
too bad to really see anything and it’s now too late and we’ve lost
interest. I write a complaint letter to the home office of the hotel
chain.
Sunday we abandoned the idea of getting any decent food in this
place. Once again, we trudge out of the hotel after asking the maids
and housekeeping to please clean our room. Once again we return
and once again the room has not been cleaned. We give up on the
idea of this ever being done. I leave a wake up call for 5am as
we have to take the shuttle back to Denver at 6.
About 9pm, I get a call from a nice lady who says she has gotten
a call from their corporate office about my complaint letter. She
wants to know what she can do to make our stay more enjoyable. Since
we are going to bed and have to get up in 8 hours to leave for home,
there isn’t much she can do outside of teleporting us back home,
which I don’t think she can do anytime soon.
Thinking that there isn’t anything else this place can do to screw
up, I set my alarm clock on my cell phone, just in case they don’t
make the wake up call. Sure enough someone had forgotten to reset
their clocks for the change over to daylight saving time and they
didn’t call until we were walking out the door. The perfect ending
to a perfect weekend.
Never again will we stay at any of these hotels from hell. More
stress than I needed. The house never looked so good…
|
