First and foremost, I commend Amanda in the VIP Lounge. She is one of the most professional, courteous, and engaging hotel employees I have met in my many years of travel for business and leisure. I can see easily why you have her serving Golden Nugget’s VIP clientele: You are placing your best people to serve your most important customers. Good call!
Although I am not technically a Golden Nugget VIP, I first encountered Amanda because she took pity on the long line trying to check in on the morning of Tuesday, November 4. There was a problem with my reservation, and I couldn’t use the kiosk to register, so I had to wait in the slowly moving check-in line. Amanda called three women who were in front of us as well as my husband and me into the VIP Lounge. I marveled at how thorough she was in her instructions to the women in front of us, answering their questions and providing direction. She was on task but she was still able to be so nice and friendly; quite the juggling act to ensure customers’ satisfaction.
Once she was complete with the women, Amanda called us up, and we were made to feel like royalty. She explained what was wrong with my reservation(s). How did I have two? I felt like I had lost my mind since I’m normally more organized that that, but she assuaged my concerns and cancelled the reservation I had made directly with GN because she couldn’t do anything with the other reservation (which I’d made through Expedia). She returned the deposit and charged me the resort fee for the other reservation, all the while helping me understand what had occurred, answering my questions, and just being a lovely person. You have a 24K employee on your hands there.
Please let the above stand on its own because I am taking advantage of this opportunity while I have your attention. Amanda’s excellent customer service aside, here are some matters that I’ve noticed and/or that I’m hoping you can help me resolve or understand:
1. I was charged $12 per package mailed to GN for me from Amazon. I had called Monday night (before arriving on Tuesday) to get mailing directions from the operator(?), and she provided me the address; however, she never mentioned that there was a $12 per package fee. Considering that I have the option of shipping packages to an Amazon pickup point, and we have a rental car, I would never have selected the mail to GN option had I known of this charge. Because the operator did not inform me that there was an additional charge, I am hoping that you can waive the fee. For the two packages I received Wednesday and/or Thursday (the days run together during vacation), I had come down quickly once I got notification from Amazon that they were delivered; the bellman retrieved the packages pretty quickly since they weren’t taken back to the mailroom; i.e., they were still at the front desk. When I went down on Saturday morning to get the third package, I must have waited 15 minutes, only to find that they could not find the package; I’ll have to wait now for the manager to come in at 11:30 AM.
2. We are charged a $50+ resort fee per day; however, I’m perplexed as to what those charges go towards. H2O is closed (I was looking forward to spending down time at the pool, looking at the sharks, etc.), the Chart House, Red Noodle House, Rush Tower front desk, and more are all closed. I needed to use a downstairs restroom early one morning, and it was closed for no reason for hours. I’m sure that there is a company line as to what the resort fees go towards, but I just wanted to register my question as to why we are charged a resort fee when this is basically not a resort but a casino with a hotel—at least for this season. Oh, and nowhere on your web site nor anywhere else is there any mention of the aforementioned closures. One doesn’t know it until arriving on site.
3. I have a feeling that you already know that vagrants are all around the hotel in the early morning hours, and since I don’t know Las Vegas laws on loitering, I do wonder if Security is prohibited from doing any sort of enforcement work. I think the vagrants are loitering and cutting through the casino. Although I can’t blame them, it really does impact our vacation experience.
4. We didn’t have housekeeping service Thursday, although we made a point of requesting it at 2:30 PM. I spoke with Martina in my broken Spanish, and perhaps she didn’t have time to clean the room, but for yesterday (Friday), they merely “phoned in” the cleaning of the room. They didn’t mop the floor from shower leakage nor around the toilet. It appears that all they did was take out the trash, make the bed, and provide fresh bath linens. There was a used washcloth remaining in the shower, for example. It’s not a big deal, we can live without service, but we wanted to make sure someone was made aware.
5. For two consecutive days, what I presume to be a room-service table laden with dirty dishes and a crumpled tablecloth sat in the hallway between our room and the housekeeping door. Amazed and appalled that no one bothered to remove the table, I happily found the housekeeping door open and shoved the nasty table inside late Thursday night. I suppose it would still be there had I not moved it. When I mentioned this to the housekeeping department during my phone call to them on Friday when I wanted to ensure we’d have our room cleaned, the person on the phone said that’s a separate department and I should have called and reported this. What?! Why should a guest have to call someone to remove a soiled room-service table, when I wasn’t the guest who had ordered room service?!
6. We exercise daily. Because we had such an early flight on Tuesday, we had no time for our usual early morning workout, so we were eager to get to the fitness center ASAP after we checked in. We changed into our workout attire and went up to the fitness center. There we met a very unfriendly young man who instructed us to sign in on iPads; he said we would need to do this each day we used the fitness center or spa. He told us we would have one hour to use the fitness center. The room was very hot, as it was midafternoon and the shades were wide open with the blazing sun streaming directly in through the wall of windows. We needed to use the treadmills which faced this giant heat lamp. We went back out to the desk to ask the young man to lower the shades, which he did with absolutely no friendliness whatsoever. He gave us the impression that we had inconvenienced him. At the end of our workout (30 minutes), we asked the young man if we could have a tour of the men’s spa, whose door was locked. He said no, we don’t give tours. We asked politely if he could just open the door so we could look around, and he said no, because of other guests’ privacy. There was only one other person in the whole spa—a man on a treadmill. I asked what it would take to be able to see the spa on another day and the young man said unflinchingly, “With a day pass for $66, if you’re a guest in the hotel.” At that point, I said to my friends, “I think working out at Planet Fitness will be better.” And that’s what we’ve done each day. We are welcomed warmly and treated as valued customers at each of the nearby Planet Fitness locations. I cannot say that for the Golden Nugget Spa. For the cachet and price, that’s a real shame.
7. On Friday morning when I needed to exit the parking garage to pick up my friend for our morning trip to Planet Fitness, instead of just opening the gate as all the others have, the garage attendant came out of the cubicle, examined the front of my rental car closely, and proceeded with an inquisition: “Are you checking out? Is your vehicle registered with the hotel?” I answered her questions: “No. Yes. Can you open the gate?” Eventually she did, with a scowl and some amount of reluctance.
8. This morning (Saturday), my friend and I needed to visit Planet Fitness VERY early because of work schedules, so I pulled my rental car around to the Rush Tower porte-cochere at 4:55 AM and turned on my warning flashers. Mind you, I was at the entrance to the porte-cochere where all the cones block passage—as I have done every morning since we arrived. Suddenly, a man in a security uniform tapped on my window and told me I couldn’t park there because I was blocking the entrance. WHAT?! The entrance is already blocked with those cones! He said there would be VIPs arriving and I would be in their way. WHAT?! At 4:55 AM?! I continued to sit there until my friend appeared five minutes later. I am confused as to why I was harassed as a paying hotel guest while vagrants and prostitutes lined the sidewalks leading up to your fine hotel—but this officious little rent-a-cop said nothing to any of them—nor to the taxi drivers parked along the red fire-lane curbs.
9. There were not enough charging stations in our room. There needs to be one on EACH bedside table, not just one of them.
Please allow NONE of these complaints and requests to deter from Amanda’s superb service in her job. The only one we mentioned to her was the rude spa attendant. She encouraged us to include that in any message we sent to management, along with anything else we noticed about the Golden Nugget, so that is the purpose of this correspondence.
We are seasoned travelers and we have visited Las Vegas many times over the past nearly three decades; however, this is the first time we have stayed downtown and we carefully chose the Golden Nugget as what we perceived to be the jewel of the downtown crown of Las Vegas for its reputation, appearance, and amenities. Our experience has been mixed, as you can tell. We traveled here with a couple of friends for both work and leisure. Would we stay here again? I’m not sure. I wish I could say a resounding YES, but in all honesty, I can’t.
I hope you can take this all constructively and not altogether critically, in the spirit of improving the quality of the Golden Nugget.
