I travel on a regular basis. And when I do, my preference is to stay at a Marriott-owned hotel,…read moremostly because I can almost always count on my following top-five priorities being met:
* Cleanliness: The rooms and common areas are almost always very clean.
* Safety: Entry into the rooms is almost always via an indoor hallway, where entry is obtained through the front lobby or by key-card access into one of the main hallways.
* Quietness: Whether I'm traveling for work or for pleasure, I like to feel well-rested for a better day afterwards. And, these hotels are usually pretty quiet.
* Free perks: As an elite member of this hotel chain, most of the time I get free perks during every stay. These are usually simple (like free bottled water), but they're appreciated.
* A good membership program: Marriott offers a very good membership program for their elite members. It gives me the ability to earn free stays for the future (for pleasure) by choosing to stay here for business.
Within the Marriott chain of hotels, SpringHill Suites is one of my favorites because the rooms most often have:
* A comfortable living and work space
* A good sized TV
* A mini refrigerator
* A microwave
* A well supplied free continental breakfast
* All-day free coffee available in the lobby
Now, on to the details for my stay at this particular hotel, at the SpringHill Suites, by Marriott (in Webster, Texas). The primary reason I came here was for a week-long business trip. Most of my expectations for this hotel (noted above) were met, but this place had several disappointments. These included:
* This hotel gave away all rooms with a king-sized bed, even though I reserved one in advance.
* There was no "Do not Disturb" sign for my room, so I was interrupted when I did not want to be.
* On my floor, the 6th floor, the entire hallway smelled moldy, and they had fans blowing continuously to try to mitigate the terrible smell. The hotel management should not have even given any customers a room on this floor, but they did.
* The A/C system in my room was terribly loud, so much so that I could not keep it running at night because it kept me awake. This was terrible, especially since it was the summertime.
* Also with the A/C system, this could be an indicator that the A/C system in my room was going out because it was also unable to keep up with the summertime demand during the day. After returning at the end of my workday, every day, it was always uncomfortably warm in my room, even when the A/C system was programmed to maintain a comfortable temperature.
* My magnetic room key stopped working on two separate days, locking me out of my room each time. This was incredibly annoying because after realizing this, I had to go down to get my key remade each time, only then regaining access to my room.
* My room was not serviced by room service on three of the five days I was here.
* The ice machine did not work on my floor, the 6th floor, the entire time I was here. So, I had to go to another floor every time I wanted ice.
* The deadbolt lock to my hotel room door was unable to lock for the entire time I was here because the lock in the door was misaligned with the door frame. This was disturbing, especially from a safety/security perspective.
* Upon checkout, I asked the hotel to change the credit card I used during my stay. The young lady I asked said that she did this, but I could see that she did not actually do this after returning from my trip. I then had to call the hotel to get this credit card changed. Unfortunately, most of the hotel staff does not even pick up the phone. I ended up calling over fifteen times over three days, where I either got a random voicemail message or I got hung up on. This is terrible customer service.
Overall, I liked this hotel, but there were just too many things that were annoying to even give this location an average rating. Therefore, I have to rate this location as a "below average" experience. To me, having so many problems that a customer can experience just shows negligence on the management's part, which made me tempted to rate this as a 1-star experience. But again, you can see that this hotel was nice (from my pictures), so I'll rate this as two stars. This hotel clearly has the potential to be a 5-star worthy location, but the management just needs to make more of an effort for their customers.
