DillMan

I haven't started a thread here in ages but my recent experience at a REN was truly astounding.

I checked around 4pm or so after working most of the day fresh off a red eye. The FD clerk was restive to offering me the welcome amenity given that it is for "Platinums only" and I'm a mere "Premier". I only pushed the issue because I was starving but didn't want anything more than a snack before what I hoped was an early night. After a "gesture of good will" I was allowed to fill out the card and selected water and the cheese and cracker option. I asked for delivery as soon as possible.

I headed up to my room and did a couple hours of work. Room service was no where to be seen. Around 7pm I decided to just head to the lounge. The lounge at this hotel is on a kind of mezzanine level with just a couple meeting rooms generally used as reception lounges for special events. On this particular night they had rented one of those reception rooms and the event coordinator had blocked access from the stairs and 1 of the two elevators for their event. If you didn't have a pass for the reception you could not pass security so the only way to access the lounge was to play elevator roulette. It took 8 tries to get the correct elevator and once I finally gained access I discovered the lounge attendant picked up the food service early because "it was surprisingly dead." Ummm, gee....I wonder why.

By now it is around 7:45pm, I'm still hungry and I'm almost dead with fatigue. The restaurants at the hotel were packed and it was pouring cats and dogs, so walking to a nearby restaurant was out of the question. I finally gave in, called room service, ordered a steak and soup, and asked to cancel my welcome amenity. I was told they were a bit busy and to expect my food in 45 minutes or less.

Fast forward 2 hours and 30 minutes. I'm too tired to work any more but couldn't even if I wanted to as I had already consumed about a third of my laptop in my extreme state of hunger. Finally I hear a knock at the door and, lo and behold, it is room service. As I'm signing the ticket I notice the amount is quite a bit less than it should be. I ask about this and we discover that my tray contains a club sandwich with ketchup (not my taste), fries, a different kind of soup, and my welcome amenity. I'm told I can send it back if I like, but since it is a return it would be a low priority order, so I probably wouldn't see my replacement until 11pm or even midnight. Furthermore, I'm told I have to sign for the order anyway and then try to "convince" the front desk to remove the first meal the next morning.

I end up keeping the food, figuring I can eat the meat from the sandwich, the soup, and my welcome amenity. I left a few dollars above the service charge and the guy has the guts to tell me I should have left more since our conversation means he missed the opportunity to take another order to someone else, which "hurts his back pocket".

I figure any food is good food at this point and start uncovering my food. It obviously had been under a heat lamp for a long long time. The club sandwich was so soggy that the bread could not support its own weight and the cheese was fully melted. The best part was the welcome amenity. They had plated the fries on top of the cheese and let the whole thing sit since (according to the printed time on the ticket) 8:04pm - so roughly 2 hours. The cheese had melted out of its container and actually bonded to the plastic wrap for the crackers. On top of that, the fries had drenched everything in grease.

In the end, the only thing edible was the soup. At least I didn't starve. I went to the front desk the next morning. I was told that the cheese was "free" after all and I'd only received it as a gesture of good will as per notes in my account. The manager did finally look past those notes and acknowledge that I should have been offered the amenity regardless of any good will.

He did offer a $10 restaurant coupon, which I declined. My only goal was to make him aware of what I perceive as bad practices by his room service people. His parting shot to me was - "Please understand sir that paying orders have to take precedent when we are busy and customers that are receiving free gifts or that change their order can't be our priority."

Really? You mean like the $50 overpriced steak I tried to buy? Or the $400/night average room rate I've paid over the dozens and dozens of times I've stayed at this property?

I really wonder why Marriott can't seem to understand that giving perks is only a good thing if they don't blow up in the guest's face. I'd honestly be a happier guest if the welcome points / amenity weren't promised rather than the current situation of front desk confusion, snide remarks, and points that never post. Marriott's attempt to thank us for our loyalty angers me at Marriott way more than it makes me grateful.

SkiAdcock

I'm confused - you posted the Great American Novel re: your experience (which sucked in about every way they could screw up & I'd be royally po'd too) - and yet you didn't post the name of the property so your fellow FTers would know of the lack of customer service & to avoid the property. Why leave out that itty bitty detail?

Cheers.

ohmark

Not naming the property in such a tale is like a joke without the punch line or a novel where the main character goes nameless. C'mon!

gardener

Yeah - let's let the FT community "hit them in their back pocket" - they have earned it!

DCBob

+1. When the property is not even named, I tend to think that one might be telling a tall tale. So WHAT is the property, OP?

fireworksboy

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9330; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.706 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

Things like this are on a "need to know basis" and I, for one, need to know which hotel this is. Come on, spill

berlindave

%$^&#* Marriot

Air BNB.com

kcblakely

I'm sorry. I call BS. Nothing about this post makes any sense at all; especially the part about leaving a few dollar tip *above* the already-added-in service charge and then being told by the room service guy that he should have added more. There is no universe in which all this stuff would happen simultaneously, and in a Ren to boot.

I'm eager to be shown otherwise, but I think OP is either leaving out huge swaths of info, or this is made up from whole cloth.

lexdevil

Wow. I'm not going to dig through the OP's history on FT, but the combination of long tenure and number of posts would lead me to presume in his favor without evidence to the contrary.

apodo77

Not sure what one has to do with the post being 100% factual.

Have you ever come close to waiting 2.5 hours for room service and then for them to bring you something you didn't even order? And then have an attendant speak to you in such a manner? I know I haven't in my 10 years of travel.

Wouldn't you call down after about 45 minutes and the promised time passed?

Also he never once thought to pick up the phone and call management to help remedy any of these issues at said unnamed hotel?

It for sure could have happened just as he posted but I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility something may have been a tad embellished either.

lexdevil

I once waited two days for my Platinum amenity at the Long Beach Airport Marriott. It never arrived, despite repeated calls to check on its status.

Though I have never had room service bring the wrong meal, I have had it take something in the two hour neighborhood. This usually occurs when the hotel is quite full.

I have waited for several hours for delivery of roll away beds, extra linens, refrigerators, etc., despite assurances that they would be sent, "right up." In these cases, I have often had to call repeatedly in order to receive the requested item.

So...while I have never experienced the confluence of pathetic customer service events described by the OP, I find them within the realm of imagination.

kcblakely

I don't. I suppose we shall have to agree to disagree ...

SkiAdcock

Well the OP could have avoided most of the commentary on whether he was embellishing or not simply by providing the name of the property in his OP, and then we could have focussed on the customer service there and/or whether others have experienced the same .

Cheers.

aaupgrade

I actually think both of you are saying the same thing. Lexdevil did NOT say "in the realm of reality", he said " in the realm of imagination" which leads me to believe he thinks the OP imagined this, which is akin to BS (what you said) if one is trying to pass it off as real.

Either way, lacking a hotel name, this thread has about 14 more posts than it deserves, mine included.

lexdevil

Actually, the opposite. "Within the realm of imagination" means "imaginable," as opposed to "unimaginable." Things that are "imaginable" are capable of being imagined. When something is "unimaginable" or too outlandish to be true, we say it is "beyond the realm of imagination."

That said, I do think that the OP should have named the hotel in question, not to establish his veracity, but to give a heads up to other FTers.