This hotel has ROACHES. My mother, my husband, my 3 month old son, and I booked this hotel a month in advance for Family Weekend at EIU. We checked in at about 4 pm and while I was curling my hair, a roach crawled out from behind the coffee pot and we killed it. My mom took it to the front desk and they apologized and offered to buy her a drink. We figured if there was only one it wasn't a big deal and there was no other hotel with open rooms for the night anyway, so we stayed. Later that night when we got back from the activities the school had planned, my husband and I went to the hotel bar and my mom stayed in the room with our 3 month old son. She called us and said to get someone from the hotel to come to the room with us immediately. We went back to the room and she was trying to kill a roach making its way out of the door of the room. The roach got away into the hallway.
When the night assistant from the hotel got there, my mom was trying to explain what happened and that she saw two roaches and could not kill them because they were too fast. As the attendant was leaving to call the manager, we pointed out a roach on the wall. He didn't see that one; instead, he tried to catch one (with his hands) that was on the floor. So there were two at the same time right by the door and air conditioner. At this time, we called other hotels in the area and found one that had a cancellation at 10 pm that night. So we went there. We left this hotel at 1:30 am with a baby to avoid sleeping with the roaches. The hotel we left to was $60 more expensive than the roach infested one.
We don;t have a ton of money to spare, which is why we are sharing a room, but we wanted to be there for my sister's 1st Family Weekend. We COULD NOT stay in this room though. I was scared that a roach would crawl into my 3 month old son's mouth while we were sleeping.As we were packing to leave, I moved a towel away from my laptop and another one crawl off and onto the wall. I have attached what pictures my mom took (they are blurry, but it was crawling fast up the wall).
In the morning, we came back to this hotel and spoke with the owner. We asked that our room be refunded and that our night at the other hotel was paid for because we did not budget for paying $60 more than expected and we had no intention of leaving the hotel until there were roaches crawling around. I said to the owner that roaches tend to stay in the dark. The only time they come out into the light and when there is noise is if the place is infested. The fact that we saw at least 4 roaches while the lights were on, the TV was on, and there were at least 2 people in the room means that there were many more when the room was dark and quiet.
The owner was extremely rude. He was smirking as I explained my concern about my baby being in a room that had several roaches in it. He did not seem to care or sympathize at all. He said that he would give the money back for our room but he had no intention of paying another hotel for our stay. I told him that we had no intention of staying at another hotel, but his is infested with roaches and we could not have stayed. He didn't care.As we were waiting for the refund to be done, one of the hotel employees came and in a snarky voice accused us of stealing all of the towels from our room. We did not steal the towels. Why on earth would we want towels that have been sitting in a room with roaches for God knows how long? We wouldn't. They just wanted to try and make us look bad as we were expressing our concerns about the infestation they had.
I have never stayed at such a terrible hotel in my entire life. The roaches were disgusting, but the way the OWNER of the hotel treated us was unacceptable. I placed a call to the Health Department. I strongly advise anyone who would think to stay here that they do not. If you don't end up bringing roaches home, you might end up being treated terribly by the owner and his employees. It is clear he trained them in his image. read more