My husband and I and our 11 year old son stayed here recently. This is a mom-and-pop establishment, which at first we thought was a nice thing. The place was clean enough and no more uncomfortable than any other budget motel. We ran into a problem the last night we were there. We had to get up early Sunday morning for a flight home. We went to bed early, as we had to drive over 3 hours to the airport the next morning. In the middle of the night, the smoke alarm went off loudly. We smelled no smoke and could not figure out what the problem was. Keep in mind this podunk little place has no front desk staff after 10 pm, so we did not know what to do. We had not been told who to call in the event of an after-hours emergency, and it is not posted in the room. My husband tried pressing a button to reset it and we went back to bed. It went off again a short time later, repeatedly, and would not stop. There was no smoke in the room that we could smell, so we figured the unit was malfunctioning. We desperately needed to get back to sleep so we could get up for our flight, so my husband removed the alarm from the wall to get it to stop. After that, we were finally able to sleep the rest of the night. In the morning, my husband told the female proprietor before we checked out that the smoke alarm had malfunctioned in the night. Apparently, she did not mention this to her husband. As we were driving to catch our plane, several hours after leaving the motel, we get a call from the husband saying that he was charging us $250 for "smoking in the room" - which we DID NOT DO and damaging the smoke detector. We tried to explain what had happened, but he would not hear our side of the story and belligerently stuck to this outrageous extra fee - when really, he should have been apologetic about the terrible night's sleep we got! On top of that, he charged our card TWICE for the same thing, and we are out $500 - FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS - for what was at worst a misunderstanding. We have no way to prove a negative, that we didn't smoke in the room, and that leaves us completely vulnerable. As a result, we will NEVER stay in a non-chain motel or hotel again, where at least there is front desk staff that can be called and a corporate office that can be appealed to if we have a problem. It's sad that mom-and-pop places cannot be trusted to do the right thing by their guests.
EDIT: UPDATE - I had to call Ellsworth Maine Police Department for assistance. A detective went out to review the situation. We are now only being charged $50. At least that is less money stolen from us. A good hotel owner who cared about his guests would have given us at least that much of a refund for the wretched night's sleep we got from his malfunctioning equipment. I will still tell everyone I know NOT to stay in this motel, ever. read more