HotelChatter

When I arrived late at night, I found out that the rooms are spread out across a large number of buildings to the point where it would have taken ten minutes to walk if I wanted to wheel my suitcase on the road.  So after taking a long, cross country flight, a late taxi pickup complicated by an accident on the freeway, I arrived at the hotel around midnight, only to have to sit around and wait for a ride to my room.  The only saving grace is that my room was on the ground floor.  Most of the buildings have no elevators, which means you either have to lug your luggage up to the second floor motel style or have a bellhop do it.  The layout also meant that I had to walk down to the main building in the rain the next morning.

The kitchen shut down at 11:00, so there was no way to get a proper meal.  The best the staff could do was to bring me a cold sandwich and some chips from the gift store.

I found a dead bug on the desk.  When I woke up in the morning, I found a dead bug in my bed.

The Internet connection is ridiculous, crawling along at 120 kbps.  The service is so slow that many webpages timed out before they could load.

There is also no telephone on the desk.  The only phone is a wired phone (not cordless) by the bed.

The business center was closed.  All they can do is offer you to use the computer at the front desk.

The windows by the door are not covered by blinds, so there is no way to make the room dark at night.

The HVAC system is a joke.  There is no air conditioning in the rooms, so it was very uncomfortable in the room during the day when it was foggy and humid (which is quite common this close to the Golden Gate Bridge).  They told me I am supposed to open the windows.  The windows only open about two inches, and there are no windows in the middle of the room on one side, so it was impossible to generate any decent cross breeze.  And to top it all off, one of the largest windows the room was broken and wouldn't open.  And opening the windows gives you the pleasure of hearing the foghorns.  The problem is so persistent that the hotel leaves ear plugs on every pillow.

At night, when I needed heat, I found the heating system to be equally ridiculous.  There is no thermostat.  You are supposed to depend on an ambient floor heating system.  Any supplemental heat is supposed to come from a gas log fireplace, which runs on a timer for a maximum of 120 minutes.  In short, there is no way to set the room to maintain a consistent temperature.  

After all of these problems, the staff promised to move me to one of the only three rooms on the property with air conditioning.  My group was about to leave for dinner, so they said I could move later.  After I got back from dinner, the staff told me that they had given my room away to someone else.  They tried to give me another room, but that room was even stuffier and did not have any screens on the windows, so I could not even open the window.  In short, the staff made it worse by promising me something and then not being able to deliver.

This is by far the worst experience I have had staying at a hotel in a long, long time.  The conference organizer was quite embarrassed.  The location is pretty, but the facility just didn't work.