I just stayed at the Laingdon Hotel for ATP Festival. While I have taken to putting the vast majority of my hotel/ motel/ B&B reviews on Tripadvisor because it is dedicated to those businesses and I can more easily keep track of where I've stayed when returning for a future trip, in this case I felt the previous review was so off-kilter that I needed to post something over here. Although I should probably thank the previous reviewer for helping to scare people off so that when I went to book for ATP far later than I should have, the Laingdon had two rooms left when most of the rest of Asbury Park and Ocean Grove were sold out. I got a very nice room and had a decent experience at the Laingdon. It's not perfect, but it's dern nice if you understand what B&Bs are like and what you are likely to get.
First, it seems like the last guy had some problem with the fact that the Laingdon (which is clearly a B&B even though it calls itself "Hotel") doesn't automatically bump you up to the nicest room when you book a cheaper room but there's nicer ones available. Maybe some B&Bs do that, but the vast majority of them in my experience do not. For most of them, including the Laingdon, you choose the room, or at least the type of room (i.e. ocean view, porch, no ocean view, etc. with prices accompanying each room or type) when you book, and when you show up, what you booked is what you get. Hotels, like the Marriott, Sheraton, etc. are busy year-round and are operating on a different economy of scale, so it's pretty easy for them to bump up a traveler to a nicer room if there's one available, although they do not always do that either (unless you're in some loyalty program that entitles you to an automatic upgrade). B&B's, by contrast, have periods during the year (or even during the week) when they are definitely not busy and not full, and if they went bumping people up to the nicest room every time they had a nicer room available, with no corresponding change in price, then pretty soon those rooms, which are often larger with more amenities requiring more cleaning and maintenance, would be in use far out of proportion to the benefit the innkeeper *might* be getting from a repeat visitor.
Moving right along, again if you stay at a lot of B&B's you'll find that there are two different types of owners. The first kind pretty much puts you in your room, maybe says hello to you once a day at breakfast time, but the rest of the time leaves the guests alone unless they specifically request something. The second kind want to chat with the guests, hang out, make conversation, and generally be more involved with them. Obviously the older couple who runs the Laingdon falls in the second group. Also, it may come as a shock but there are B&B guests who actually appreciate an owner being friendly and chatty and don't like it when the owner disappears after check-in. I would add that the way the Laingdon is set up, the main living room, which is also the lobby area for guests, is clearly where the couple who lives there "live" during the day, in contrast to some other B&B's that have a living room mostly for the guests and the proprietors do their daily sitting and TV-watching in a different wing of the house. You can't blame the owners for wanting to hang out in that living room because the view of the ocean is there, and they probably want to enjoy their own property too. In any case, like most guests I was only in the lobby for like 5 minutes a day in between going out sightseeing and to ATP shows, so exchanging a few words with the owner during those 5 minutes wasn't burdensome.
I was pretty impressed by the fact that when I arrived at 9 pm after several hours of train ride, in the cab of someone who did not know the area and couldn't find the house, Bill the owner was actually out on the front steps waving me in. He insisted on carrying my bag up several flights of stairs (no elevator here) and was just nice as could be. My room with ocean view and fireplace was lovely, quite clean (I would have liked a little more frequent change of the sheets), had a minifridge and wet bar, and best of all REALLY good plumbing! Most older house B&Bs have wimpy water pressure - not this joint. Wi-fi worked great. Breakfast was cereal/ muffins/ toast/ fruit on paper plates, so if you are looking for fancy hot foods on china go somewhere else - again given my agenda I was just as glad to skip the fuss.
Only bad thing about this place is that in hot weather, the room ACs apparently don't work well and drip water, causing a plastic bag to have been placed over part of the furniture under the unit. I would be cautious of staying here in hot weather, but for end of September, not a problem - the balcony doors that open on the ocean provided more than enough cool breeze. Overall it was a nice place for a stay, at least in the cooler months. A little pricey but for a sold-out festival weekend, that's expected. read more
