A fun time at the Econo Lodge -- in person and online
I have to confess that we were warned off the place by friends -- but they said they'd stayed there five years ago and we thought a) how bad could it be? and b) maybe it's changed since then.
It was an all-around awful experience, made worse when I came home and tried to complain via the Choice Hotels website. After filling in all the form fields and hitting "Submit" I got a message that I needed to fix the errors in red. I looked as closely as I could at the page and saw no errors in red. I double-checked all the required fields and saw they had been filled in. I switched browsers in case Choice Hotels does not play nice with Firefox, but I had the same difficulty with Explorer.
Finally, I gave up. I emailed a complaint about my inability to complain (via a different web form) and thought I would share the complaint with all of you, since Choice Hotels doesn't seem to want it. (Maybe they are embarrassed by the hotel; I tried to look it up on their website, but they say it does not exist.)
I would have gone on longer (and have, at TripAdvisor), but Choice limits you to 1,024 characters (which, apparently, you're not allowed to submit anyway). So here's what I had to say:
The room toilet had a very poor flush and the bowl almost immediately became blocked. I called the desk, and the person on duty (Joey, I think) said he would find me a plunger and would call back soon.
He never called back.
Later, I went down to the desk and found somebody new on duty. He said the previous person had not said anything about the problem, and he hadn't left any notes either.
The man working the desk then offered to help, walked past a family who had just arrived at the desk (without acknowledging them at all) and disappeared. A few minutes later, he came back and walked across the lobby with a plunger in hand. He then proceeded to hand it to me.
The night was marred by rowdy youths who spent hours yelling, shouting, running around and tapping on other patrons' windows. The staff seemed unconcerned. (At one point I called the desk to complain, and the noise level went down very briefly.)
Staff seemed not very competent, and our stay was not worth anywhere near the cost of the room.
Apparently the Best Western five minutes away is quite nice.
Labels: Customer service, Travel


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