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Solo Travel · November 20252/10
I stayed here while I was recovering from cancer treatment, and honestly the service was so poor, it was laughable.
They don't have automated check-in so you have to queue for sometimes up to 20-30 m...I stayed here while I was recovering from cancer treatment, and honestly the service was so poor, it was laughable.
They don't have automated check-in so you have to queue for sometimes up to 20-30 minutes to check in, which is a major access barrier for someone like me who suffers from extreme fatigue and cannot stand for that long.
The person on the check-in desk struggled to figure out how to put an incidentals hold on a debit card - I know North Americans use credit cards as standard but surely an airport hotel must have a lot of international visitors, including people from countries like France where credit cards practically don't exist? I made sure my debit card had a few spare thousand Euro on it because I knew they'd need to put a hold on it (I'm not sure what North Americans do to hotel rooms that make "incidentals holds" necessary, but I am aware that this is standard in North America).
My room was nice, but the water broke the first day - the taps in the sink suddenly stopped working (as in, I switched the tap on, water came out, then water just stopped). I went to the front desk to report it and the person at the front desk was like, "yeah yeah we'll deal with it, bye bye." And I had to be like, ummm don't you need my room number? I mean, not having any running water is a pretty big problem, and they just palpably didn't care.
Getting into the breakfast room also involves standing in a long queue, and the person manning the breakfast room queue was argumentative over the fact the check-in person was supposed to have given me breakfast tokens but I guess forgot, and tried to insist I go back to the check-in desk and stand in another extremely long queue. I am visibly quite seriously disabled and unwell; it's insane to ask an obviously mobility impaired person to stand for 30 minutes in a queue because someone forgot to do their job.
The breakfast buffet had limited choice and nothing was labelled. They also had no vegan options - for example I had to carry my own soy milk down to breakfast with me every day except for two days, because it was such an effort finding a staff member to go dig the one mini-carton of soy milk they apparently have stored away. Being originally from the UK where it's the norm to have a range of non-dairy milks even in the cheapest hotel and everything by law is labelled with allergens, I did find this very difficult - maybe it's just culture shock, maybe Canada just doesn't have any awareness of allergies/dietary restrictions. Which is fine since obviously Canada doesn't have laws about this the same way other countries do, but when I asked the kitchen staff what products had dairy in them, they had no idea. One person recommended the cottage cheese as a vegan option (!!!) and then the pastries. I double checked that the pastries were made with margarine/vegan butter - because obviously pastries have butter as a standard ingredient, but it's not uncommon for cheaper pastries to use margarine, and the kitchen staff had no idea pastries are made with butter at all, and told me their breakfast items are mass produced and delivered in bulk. And this is a restaurant that brags about their award-winning chef?
I was also disappointed that there was no option to order a latte or similar, just a giant vat of pre-made drip coffee, then later I found out they had an entire separate menu which you can order from, but you have to pay extra. I would happily have paid extra to order breakfast menu items but I had no idea they even had a breakfast menu that was separate from the buffet. Why would you not tell people that? I've never ever been in a restaurant that acted like the existence of a menu was secret.
The quality of the food was also poor. I drank some orange juice and it was quite obviously rancid/gone off to the point it was fizzy, and the vat of orange juice was quite visibly rotting throughout the week. I don't know if it's ever cleaned, I worried they just top it up every day. Imagine not noticing that you're serving food that's so badly spoiled it's visibly fizzing.
The swimming pool wasn't locked so anyone could wander in off the street. The first day I went for a swim before breakfast and there was a woman fully dressed with all her luggage with her. Perhaps she was a guest waiting for check-in time, but it felt a bit weird knowing that the pool could be accessed without a keycard.
The staff also seemed low key hostile, with the exception of one man who I think was maybe head of the breakfast room who was nice and brought me a mini-carton of soy milk without me asking on my last morning. That was literally the only time a staff member treated me like a human being. Like wow I'm so sorry a severely disabled person with food allergies is such a big annoyance, guys.Show More
