Elegant Simplicity

We took a trip to Marshall, TX over the weekend. Here is a copy of the letter I sent to LaQuinta through their contact-us page. I am not happy.

We arrived at the La Quinta in Marshall around 9:00 on Friday evening. We were assigned hotel rooms 251 and 263. The problems started there…

I stood behind a couple that were given a room key to an already-occupied room. I made sure that I locked my door with both locks that night.

I went to get ice, and there was only a single ice machine in the entire hotel that was working, and it was on the opposite side of the complex. There were obvious locations where the machines could be, but two of them were completely empty (upstairs and downstairs). The upstairs ice machine across the campus was out of order, so the only ice machine working was the one closest to the front desk.

As we were getting ready for bed, a cockroach crawled up the bathroom door, and we found two or three more cockroaches in the bathroom under the sink. Simply disgusting.

On Saturday night, we got back to the hotel around 9:00 to find the parking lot nearly full because the convention center next door was having a huge party. They had a huge stereo as well, and we could hear the bass throughout the hotel until midnight. Once that stopped, we could hear several couples in adjoining rooms coming in drunk from the party, and the couple in the next room over decided it would be a good idea to have sex for the next 30 to 45 minutes. At least the air-conditioner was loud enough to drown that out.

Lastly, I went down to the front desk to complain about the whole ordeal on Sunday while I was checking out, and there were 6 or 8 people waiting at the front desk and the poor guy working the front desk was frazzled because the one printer under the counter wasn’t printing invoices. By this point, I was so frustrated that I just left.

All in all, I had a very poor experience with your hotel, and I doubt that I will stay there again. There are some serious problems that need to be addressed, and I’m not sure the current management staff is up to the job.

Next year, I will most defnitely not be staying anywhere near the LaQuinta hotel. That’s ridiculous.

Update 6/15/2007: I received a call from the hotel manager this morning.  He apologised several times for the problems I had with the hotel and reassured me that’s not the way he runs his hotel.  He said he was willing to refund the price of the rooms, however since I had booked my trip through American Express travel services, he was unable to do so since he had not charged me directly.  Instead, he is going to send me two free room gift certificates for the next time I stay there.

I’m glad that he took the time to try and make things right, but it’s going to be a while before I convince myself to stay there again…