If you are considering this hotel for a meeting or event, I strongly encourage you to look elsewhere and let me tell you why.
I hosted our company's annual planning meeting here earlier this month. The planning and lead up to the event was smooth and their team, lead by Leslie, were very responsive and accommodating.
During the event, we elected to have the hotel provide lunch for our group of 14 attendees. Within an hour of lunch, I became violently ill. Nobody else was sick and we had been sharing food all week so by process of elimination, I confirmed with the rest of the attendees that I was the only person to eat one of the items offered for lunch. I will spare the details, but it was bad enough that I couldn't leave my hotel room for 2 days and had to miss the most important event of our year which I had organized and was supposed to be leading. It wasted nearly $100K in business costs between hotel/event costs, travel expenses, and the attendee's time.
All of that being said, I can understand that while unfortunate, these things happen. What was most frustrating with the experience was the response from the hotels management. I alerted the hotel immediately once I realized what made me sick. Their immediate response was "I spoke with the chef and cooks and there's no way that their food could've caused this." Ok...no investigation, no questions, just completely diverting responsibility. I then escalated it to their management team. The following week I heard from their General Manager, Tom, who asked me a few questions over the phone and told me "they were going to do an internal investigation and get back to me with what they could do." A day later, Tom reached out to me via saying "there is no finding linking your illness to the lunches you had here" and "we are unable to offer compensation in this case". It was a completely irresponsible, and quite frankly a negligible response, void of empathy, and utterly against Marriott's core values to act with integrity and to put people first. At the very least they could've not charged me for the meals that I couldn't eat while stuck in my hotel room for 2 days, or comp'd me for the $12 worth of Gatorade and advil that was brought to my room.
Sadly, it became clear immediately that the management of this hotel has no sympathy for its clientele, no willingness to make gestures in good faith, and takes no shred of responsibility for something that was so clearly caused by something they provided.
It goes without saying that my business will not spend another dollar at Marriott properties - not because of what happened, but because of how I was treated in response. read more