I don’t do this often, but I’m going to today.
Do what?
Trash a business, that’s what.
You see, this business is a hotel, and it’s part of the ChoiceHotels‘ Choice Privileges program.
Here’s the thing — my husband travels . . . a lot. He’s gone probably 50% of the time. It used to be more until he started telecommuting. Even so, 50% is a lot. One of the only terrific bonuses to having a job that requires this much travel is being able to join programs like Choice Privileges and Priority Club, so that you can end up with enough points to get free hotel nights.
The free hotel nights enable us to have time as a family on some great field trips and vacations. On our recent vacation to Florida — we did not pay for one hotel night. While that’s fabulous for us, it’s also a testimony to how often my husband is gone away from us.
Anyway, my kind husband found a free night for me on my recent trip to the Midwest Homeschool Convention. My friend, Sam, and I stayed together for one night at the Millenium (no complaints here), but were planning to go to the Creation Museum on Saturday. As a side note, we ended up at IKEA instead. But that’s a treatise for another day.
The hotel in question today is on the road to the Creation Museum and near the Cincinnati airport. That’s why I’m writing this post. I have lots of friends who visit the Creation Museum, and I do not want you to make a reservation at this hotel.
When Sam and I arrived there on Friday night, we had a reservation for a King room, but asked for a room with 2 beds. They kindly exchanged rooms for us.
That’s when the bad stuff started happening.
Room number two hadn’t been cleaned. This is at 8pm, mind you. They asked us to wait in the lobby while they cleaned it. Huh?
We were hungry, so we let them know we’d go eat and be back in an hour. We arrived back two hours later and were given keys to a third room. I’m guessing they didn’t get the other room clean, or had given it to someone else. No explanation was offered.
We discovered they didn’t get this room clean either. Except this time, they claimed they did. Little signs were placed all around — on the beds, in the bathroom — letting us know the room had been cleaned.
Only, it was disgusting. I mean really nasty.
The beds looked as though someone had slept in them for a month and tossed the bedspread quickly over the sheets so it would look made. You know, the way you might do at home if unexpected company came knocking at the door before you had a chance to make your bed. The bathroom had urine on the toilet and dirty soap with body hair in the shower. Trash cans were full of waste.
This was not a clean room. This was my conversation with the front desk clerk:
Me: Hi Katherine. It’s Marcy again. Ummmm . . . this room is not clean. There’s urine on the toilet and dirty soap in the shower. Makes me wonder if the beds are really clean.
Katherine: They probably aren’t. Come on back down.
So, we received keys to another King room, and Katherine informed us this was the last room they had, so she “hoped this would work for us.”
While she was apologetic, she did not seem surprised by what was going on. Interesting, huh?
This room, number four now, had food left in the ice bucket, more hair in the shower, and when I opened the mini-fridge, it smelled like something had died in it. Thankfully, the beds did appear to be clean (and without bed bugs — you know we check that!), so we stayed. It was 11 pm by now and we really had no choice.
Twice after we settled in that night, someone seemingly attempted to open our door. At 8 am, the maintenance man knocked to ask if he could come in to “check the lights.”
That was a Saturday morning at 8 am.
Needless to say, we skipped the free breakfast. We were not taking any chances there.
On the way home, I called my husband to inform him that he would need to make a call to Choice Privileges. The conversation started out like this:
CP: How may I help you?
Tom: Well, my very angry wife will be arriving home in about 2 hours.
CP: Oh my, sir. Will you need to book a room?
They laughed, and my husband went on to tell my story. Actually he only told about half before the kind lady on the phone stopped him saying, “I’ve heard all I need to hear. We will be promptly refunding your points and I will contact this owner myself right away.”
I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.
She also gave us a tip:
If you don’t think the hotel will be booked, arrive first, ask to see a room, and then call and book. Nice.
Apparently, they’re having some issues with some ChoiceHotels and are weeding out the bad ones. I can only hope they’ll dump this one.
For the record, we have stayed in some really super nice ChoiceHotels. So this is not a statement against all of them.
Just this one disgusting hotel — located off exit 2 of I-275 in Erlanger, KY, on the road to the Creation Museum and Cincinnati airport.
Consider yourself warned.
I wish I had had taken pictures. I was just too tired and disgusted to even think about it.
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