We're an urban couple who'll steal away a few times every summer for a getaway weekend and have experienced all of the above (and more) at suburban hotels (and it hasn't been limited to FS Marriotts).

About three years ago someone in sales at the Marriott Farmington actually reserved the outdoor pool area for weddings on two of three weekend afternoons and had the audacity to distribute a letter to guests asking them to "join in celebrating the union of two wonderful couples" and telling them that they still had alternative ways to entertain themselves (like pay per view movies, at the game room, and taking advantage of the walking trail.

This on a weekend when they were also hosting multiple sub-teen soccer teams.

You can imagine the resultant havoc at the single remaining remaining recreational facility, the indoor pool (which of course, was, in the traditiion of modern hospitality administration, unsupervised).

Oh yeah, when the kids became bored of the over-populated swimming pool they amused themselves by practicing soccer in interior public areas.

Security?

The security staff consisted on one (1) bellman.

This summer, at a Hyatt in New Jersey we were treated to older adolescent males soccer players disrupting the pool via their "cannon-balling" into it (along with other horseplay in defiance of the posted rules). Parents had to remove their young children from the pool and adjacent areas.

In the evening we experienced thundering hordes running through the hallways (and discovered in the morning that all doors had been stripped of their "do not disturb signs").

Staff reaction?

A shrug.

This past Labor Day weekend in the Trumbull Ct. Marriott it was a mixed bag -

We and a couple with two young children were the only ones situated in one section of the CL level, well away from two wedding parties' accomodations. (Of course, in adjacent rooms.)

While there weren't many children in the hotel and not a lot of horseplay on the part of most of them, we did see a manager stand by and not react when one brat was shooting arrows (foam rubber, but annoying nonetheless) around the pool (and into seating areas and into adjacent outdoor bar's patio (as his indulgent father observed).

But, that was nothing -- two kids were yelling and running wild around the pool, hymping ftom one unoccupied chaise to another, annoying those seated in lounges, while the parents were entertaining. The parents seemed to be the center of attention for two fawning Marriott Associates (their badges and suits) were a dead giveaway.

We found out, after they'd left (from a thoroughly disgusted bartender after they'd left) that the party's host that the kids' father who was also the hotel's GM -- he'd removed his name tag, (and the two associates notorious brown-nosers).

I can't say that we've had any bad experiences due to the behavior of the wedding guests, but I've run out of patence with hotel managements whose attitude seems to be one of indifference with regards to the behavior of some and the effect it has on other guests' experience.

In the future when I complain to management about extreme behavior and lack of civility I will tell them they have a choice - address it themselves, or I will -- via a call to 911 report drunk, disorderly, dangerous behavior to the local authorities- whatever best describes what's going on.

Let them explain that to their head office superiors.