First, when we arrived on the evening of October 28th, we were told that our reservation could not be located. I originally booked the stay on October 8th, by calling the hotel directly, and I received a confirmation email and everything. Resolving this matter took about 20 minutes of the front-desk employee consulting with a manager, after which a new, manual reservation was made for us (thankfully, the hotel wasn't at full occupancy...). Then, when we finally got our reservation settled and received the room keys, we attempted to enter our room and encountered a problem with the door lock. I went back down to the front-desk, and was issued new keys and told to try again. The new keys were again unsuccessful. When I went back down to the front-desk, I was told they had recently replaced the door locks and that I should try with new keys once more. This time, they offered to have the bellhop escort me up. Again, for a third time, the new keys were unsuccessful, and the bellhop's master key was also unsuccessful. The bellhop told me they needed to contact the maintenance team to come change the locks, and that they were uncertain how long it might take for them to arrive. I went down to the lobby, at which point I encountered several other guests complaining about the same issue. We waited and consulted with the front-desk employees, and finally, after about 45 minutes, the issue was resolved.
By this time, it had been over an hour since we first arrived at the hotel and tried to check-in, and we had a dinner reservation that we were now running extremely late for. In fact, we ended up having to skip the dinner altogether and change our plans. Not exactly the birthday night I had envisioned.
After getting settled into the room, I went back down to the front desk to voice my frustrations with the check-in process. Up to this point, no offer had been made to make up for our frustrating experience at check-in. The employee at the front desk expressed their apologies and told me that in addition to granting a request for late check-out, that I would also receive complimentary overnight parking. Consider me surprised, then, when I received the invoice and saw there was a charge for overnight parking for $112.50. I would not have ever valeted my car if I had known I would be charged such a fee. The issues at check-in are one thing, but it feels awfully deceptive to be offered some sort of reconciliation that isn't followed up on.
