Monday, June 1, 2015

Sorry, Chief.

Kansas City, MO

Sometimes, people just can't catch break. The following review was found on Booking.com:

Pros: They accept pets.
Cons: Booked a room here for a mid-trip stop between Denver and Nashville. Room I booked was "unavailable" when I tried to check in at 11pm. Apparently booking.com left me an email offering to pay the difference for a room at a nicer hotel. If only I could have gotten said email in Middle-of-Nowhere, Kansas. Didn't read that email until after the situation below played out: Night manager found me a new room after complaining about booking.com not knowing what they were doing. I asked to be sure it was a non-smoking room, because the lobby was quite thick with stale cigarette smell. Turns out, all of the non-smoking rooms are all OVER the smoking floor, so all of the rooms in the entire hotel stink like smoke. All of them. A helpful sheet of paper told me that the only functioning ice maker was on the "smoking floor," so yucky ice too. My wife watched a drug deal go down in the parking lot while I was trying to fix the mysterious room problem. Right there in the open. Parking lot was full of campers (with people sleeping in them). I don't know if they were paying guest who decided to get away from the smell of their "non-smoking" rooms, or just squatters. People were apparently smoking on the non-smoking floors in the hallway at 3 AM and set off the fire alarm. Fire door was stuck at the bottom of the stairs, and took 2 people to force open. We were all wide awake after the fire alarm and standing outside barefoot for 15 minutes in 25 degrees waiting for the all clear. Decided to just drive on, since we had another marathon day ahead of us. Night deskman offered me a 10% off coupon as an apology, because that's "all he was allowed to do." Asked if he could call the manager, and he said "No, he's asleep." I said "Yeah, we wouldn't want to disturb him at this hour, would we?

The rating provided with the review was 2.5 out of 10. (Is a 0 out of 10 just considered bad form?) It was posted on April 14, 2014.