We stayed here during the Veterans Day weekend. We utilized the upgrade and got confirmed a top floor executive suite.
Usually I stay at the Marriott across the freeway, but wanted to give this place a try.
When we got there there was only one front desk person on shift. She was helping two or three parties, and in addition taking phone calls at the same time. I waited for a bit, and we it was my turn we chit chatted and she explained that she is the only person on duty at the front desk for the night. I didn’t think much of it, but this fact did affect our stay ( more on that later). In the elevator, I was looking around and found the word “fxxx you” neatly carved into the walls of the elevator. It’s the one all the way in the back. It seems like the hotel tried to paint it over with some dark paint, but in my opinion only made the words more prominent to see.
After we checked in we went to the lounge. It was a slow Sunday night, and there was nobody in the lounge(also no servers to be found anywhere). The snacks of the day was supposed to be crispy fried bbq chicken and meatballs. Both were cold, almost empty, and the salads looks really stale. The fridge was out of water. We grabbed some sodas and went into our room.
The room is very nice, however it was very cold inside(there was at least a 15 degree difference in temperature between our room and the hallway). I turned up the ac, thinking that since we are on our way out to eat (because of the unappetizing food in the lounge) it’ll be nice and toasty once we came back.
When we did come back however, it was still very cold. I turned up the ac up to 85 and waited for another 15 minutes for the room to heat up and it didn’t. I called the front desk(remember, only one person on duty) and she puts me on hold for almost 10 minutes. I know she was probably busy, so I went downstairs to the front desk to have her call engineering to check out the ac.
The maintenance person came after around 20 minutes, looked at the ac and said that because the valves are broken there is no heat in the room. He told me to call the front desk to tell them, which I did and waited for another 10 minutes on the phone, and had to go downs stairs again and asked them if I can switch to a room with a working ac. She switched me to another room, but when went into the new room, only the living room had heat and the bedroom’s ac is still just blowing out cold air.
What did I have to do? I didn’t even bother to call front desk, and went downstairs for the third time and tried to straighten things out with the front desk. They couldn’t find us another room of the same type(which I thought was weird, because I went online and could still book a sale type room right there), but they did say they can provide a portable heater. At this point, it seems like the best option and I was already very tired of all the running around so I just said ok.
You May think all these things are just trivial, but my rationale is this. If I am paying a premium for something( in this case, a premium hotel room under the premium Sheraton brand), my expectations will be equivalent of the premium that I pay. As such, I expect services such as the lounges to be manned and well stocked, the air condition to be in workable condition, and prompt levels of service, because I paid for it, you see. And really, all of these things should be expected with such a reputable brand such as Sheraton. I have stayed at many sheratons before and this experience is near the bottom In terms of quality of services.
Overall, I was very disappointed with our stay.
