In all the years I have been traveling, it is not often that I take the time to sit down and write a bad review. I'm going to this time because I have certain expectations for what is supposed to be a decent hotel chain, and it was not even close to meeting them.
- Coming into the hotel parking lot should have been my first clue that this hotel wasn't going to be decent--the parking lot was in desperate need of maintenance. Potholes and swells and dips and chipped asphalt everywhere. The parking lot in the rear resembles that of lots you see behind abandoned buildings and warehouses in cities--just without the drug paraphernalia and graffiti.
- There was a sickly odor that hit you as soon as you walked into the room; there was a separate, chemical-like smell in the hall and stairway.
- The hallways had carpets with designs that would scare the devil, and they were dirty and un-vacuumed.
- There were holes in the walls of our room--not just nail holes, but one-inch and two-inch holes--a few of which were not-really covered by pictures.
- There were loose screws coming out of the headboards of the beds.
- There was a dirty film and someone else's hair in the bathroom tub. The bathroom faucet was leaking.
- There was no temperature control in the "bedroom" that contained the third bed--it had a screen-less window filled with spider webs and other bugs and a baseboard heater that didn't work.
- The bed pillows, although many, were all this weird half-size and uncomfortable.
- When housekeeping came to our room while we were out, they barely made the beds--they just kind of pulled the sheets and blankets up without even straightening them. They didn't vacuum, change the trash, or refill the toilet paper. We had to go down to the desk and wait 15 minutes for the single front-desk worker to finish whatever she was doing and give us another one. They did, however, spray an air freshener that killed the sickly room odor for a little while.
- Our keycards barely worked. We were told when we checked in to keep the cards away from cell phones and credit cards, or they might "de-magnetize", so we put them on top of the cabinet away from all electronics and metals. One worked a few times and then quit working completely; the second never worked. When we had them re-keyed at the front desk, they didn't work at all. My two sisters and brother-in-law also had the same issue with their cards--they had to put the key card in and remove it ever so slowly without pausing in order for it to work.
- The door to get in the side entrance of the building had a keycard reader on it, but it is permanently disabled, and anybody can just walk into the hotel--not secure at all. However, with the issues they have with the simple task of creating keycards, that's probably the best anyway.
- In the course of walking from our rooms to the lobby, vending machine or ice machine, you have to go through a hallway where there is just a section of the bottom wall simply missing--there's cracked and dusty pieces of drywall everywhere, and I had to pick up a nail and throw it away so no one stepped on it.
- There is no elevator anywhere in the hotel, and although the hotel had a lot of vacancies, we were all placed on the third floor. I have knee issues, and having to climb all those flights of stairs was extremely painful. I do realize this is partially my fault for not requesting a ground-floor room; however, I have never needed to because every hotel in which I have stayed in all my years of travel has had an elevator.
- We did not bring any of our issues to the lady at the front desk, because with as little as she cared about our keycards, we didn't expect anything to actually be done. She seemed to be in a world of her own and a lot of her answers were either "I don't know" or "It's the machine's fault" and she didn't seem to care.
- To summarize, I will not be staying in any Choice Hotel ever again. I paid $350 for two nights for what equated to a $160 two-night stay at a cheap roadside motel. The ONLY positive thing I could come up with--and believe me, I have tried--was that the Wi-Fi was decent. read more