I was in Madison to give a workshop, but I had a few days on my own before and after the workshop, so my plan was to stay at the Radisson on those days.
I chose the Radisson because we had such a superior experience staying at a Radisson property in Brussels, Belgium this past summer. Sadly, the Madison hotel was the flipside of the coin -- the worst experience I've had in years of travel.
I noticed that the hotel featured down bedding (and who does that these days? -- even Europen hotels have switched to synthetic, hypo-allergenic bedding) so I made a point of asking when I made my reservation if the bedding could be switched out. The helpful reservations clerk said yes and put it in my profile so the hotel would be aware of it. Just to be sure, I called the front desk at this hotel the day before I arrived and was assured they would give me synthetic bedding.
Due to multiple travel delays, I did not arrive at the hotel until 9:45 pm. When I got to my room, there was all down bedding on both beds. I immediately returned to the front desk and asked that they give me synthetic bedding, then left to get something to eat. I returned about an hour later and discovered that their solution was to toss three synthetic pillows onto the bed. All the down bedding was still in place, but by that time, the housekeeping staff had left for the day and the desk clerk's shift was over and he was handing things off to a night clerk.
I moved all the down bedding over to the seccond bed, found a synthetic blanket in the closet, and made up a bed for myself. By two in the morning, I was having a severe reaction to the down bedding -- my face was bright red and bumpy and very itchy. Looking on the phone sheet, I could find no entry for the front desk, so I got dressed and went down to talk to the clerk. I told him we had to get the down bedding out of the room completely and his solution was to tell me to get a luggage cart from the outer lobby, take it up to my room, pile all the down bedding on it and leave it in the hall for him to pick up. Not surprisingly, I had even more of a reaction from picking up two duvets and 6 pillows, but once I got them out of the room, my reaction started to subside a bit.
The next morning, I was dismayed to find that the full breakfast was a poor presentation of junk foods along with a hot tray of awful scrambled eggs and sausage patties set up in a corner of the lobby. There were no vacant lobby chairs and no tables, so I took the food up to my room. Coffee was a big urn of institutional coffee with nothing but fake creamer -- which I cannot consume -- so I had to drive over to a Starbucks to get a decent cup of coffee.
There were other small inconveniences as well -- my room lock required 5-10 tries to open the door every time and getting a different keycard did nothing to fix that. There was an exit near my room which I could use to leave the building, but the keycard reader was broken so I could not enter through that door and had to walk around to the front door -- which I discovered during a steady rain, of course. Hallways are very long, with very high-ceilings, and dim -- it looks more like a prison than an upscale hotel. The Sleep Number bed was horrible -- it felt like a cheap, broken-down mattress with a big hollow spot. And I had to go through the whole handshake routine with the wi-fi each and every time I opened my computer, even though I hadn't left the room.
When I spoke to the desk clerks later in the day about my allergy problem and the fact that the hotel had failed to set up a room as requested, they refused to give me a discount for the previous night, instead offering a small discount for my second night and offering to give me room service coupons for a future visit to the hotel. Needless to say, there will be no future visits to this hotel.
Even more amazing, my comments on an email survey that Radisson sent me a few days later got absolutely no response. Other chains will respond to the slightest dissatisfaction in these surveys, but the Radisson (or at least the Madison hotel) apparently thinks it's above that.
I am now unlikely to visit ANY Radisson property in the future. I don't know if each hotel is run independently, but if the Radisson name is on the property, it reflects on their brand. If they tolerate a poorly-run facility in one city, how can I trust that I won't have another miserable experience in one of their other hotels? read more