85mamus
Solo Travel · September 20252/10
TITLE: HORROR HOTEL
I had a long and early flight from CA to OH. I woke up at 5am. It was a business trip.
After plane ride, car rental, some food, when I make it to my Hilton Gardens Inn Hotel, I a...TITLE: HORROR HOTEL
I had a long and early flight from CA to OH. I woke up at 5am. It was a business trip.
After plane ride, car rental, some food, when I make it to my Hilton Gardens Inn Hotel, I am greeted with the front desk who says, "write your name in this white random sheet of paper" because there are no rooms available to be assigned and you have 10 people ahead of you. They said their housekeeping staff did not arrive on 09/16/2025 to cause this delay.
They gave me NO ETA of when I would get one.
In the lobby I saw many more disheveled fellow travelers squatting morosely. “They must be ahead of me”, I thought dejectedly.
I kept checking in every so often and then 3 hours later, quite depressed when I came up to the front desk, they said, "Yes you can go to Room 304". I perk up, pick up my hefty bags and make it to the room. Shockingly the room was locked from inside with a woman yelling back saying this was her room and it should not have been assigned.
I am back down at the front desk. Waiting.
Now I am assigned Room 303.
I make it up with trepidation. The room was indeed devoid of living beings.
I feel delighted. I want to jump into the shower, after 18 hours of my life in outdoors.
Shockingly the shower handle comes off in my hands and falls to the floor! As it clanks to the floor and makes a jarring noise, I can hear my dream of a hot shower going down the drain.
I feel determined to get my shower so I head down to the front desk because the no one picks the phone up when I call.
Once downstairs, front desk assures me that maintenance personnel will show up in 20 minutes. I feel a tiny joy.
Back in my room, I sit waiting for the person to show up.
Guess what, with a click of someone with Keys to the room and a loud noise of suitcase against the door, a man tries to barge into my room. Thank God I had the additional door stopper which stops him.
He says, “I have been assigned this room!” It feels like a twisted Deja Vu where I am the one saying to him, “You have been assigned incorrectly This room is taken!”
As he leaves, I double check my door stoppers, wonder if I should prop my suitcase to back up the door before I go to bed.
Of course it has been over an hour , not just 20 minutes and no maintenance person showed up.
I tried the free wifi in my room which needed my last name and room number. Wifi did NOT work because the room was NOT assigned to me. One more thing that does not work.
I put my head down and soon I was asleep. But not for very long.
At 1:11am and at 4:17am people kept knocking incessantly at my door because they were assigned my room!
How many people can get the same room and how many times will front desk not have a proper process to track which room they are assigning to whom?
I got no rest, a splitting headache and my alarm finally dragging my un-repaired body out of my bed.
A grueling day lay ahead for me at work, I mused.
But I badly wanted a shower.
I brought myself to the front desk. A different person faced me this morning. I asked them to fix my shower.
“Our maintenance person does not come until 10am!” She said cheerily. Obviously she had a restful night.
“How can get a shower now?” I asked.
“Ok here is a key to dysfunctional room 723 which you can use for showering,” she said.
“Does the shower work in this broken 723 room?” I pursued.
“Yes of course”
I headed upstairs witan a borrowed towel from front desk.
When I tried my key on 723, the door would not open. Try, try, try again , no dice.
I spotted a housekeeping person nearby and made him try his master key.
His key would not open the door of 723 either!
I did not have the energy to go down from 7th floor to 1st to beg for another key and come back to find another unopened door and kill my shower dream.
The housekeeper took pity on me when I asked, “is there any empty room where I can shower?”
He helped open room 701 for me, saving me a down-and-up commute and time to get another key.
In the shower now, I found there was no shampoo and no conditioner.
“Does not matter!”, I said to myself. “At least the shower has warm water”.
10 minutes later, I bounce down to my room on third floor ready to change for the day, and a little upbeat from the shower.
Lo and behold, my room key to my room 303 did not work. Back in my nightmare I was.
Another housekeeper was nearby, another pleading later, she tried her key to my room. Her keys also did not work.
“Are these magical keys that stop working the next day?”, I wondered.
Down I was facing the lady at the front desk. She made me a new key.
I was not convinced anything would work anymore.
“Will you be able to come upstairs with me to make sure that the key works?” I asked
She agreed.
On 3rd floor, when my key worked I was shocked rather than surprised.
As I left for my work that day, I went to the front desk again and reminded them to fix my shower. They said , “Of course it would be done today as soon as the maintenance people show up at 10am”
It was 9:45am when I was leaving for work.
I made it to my work that day after atleast 1.5 hours spent commuting between floors to get a shower.
At 6pm I returned to the hotel and faced a new front desk person who looked like she may be the missing “management”.
I asked politely, “Is the shower to my room fixed?”
“Which room is that?”
“303”, I said
She spent scrolling through her work chat and said “No I don’t see it on my work chat.”
Basically all the promises and no action since morning.
“Can we fix my shower now?”, I asked
“Let me see where Rodrigues is. And he is the best”, she added.
A hunt for Rodrigues ensued.
He was spotted, thank god!
24 hours and 4 reminders later, my shower was fixed.
Day 2, when I took shower in my own room, I found the shampoo and the shower gel bottle completely empty. No one refilled it. But by now I came to realize the kind of hotel I had gotten myself into.
It was almost cruelly hilarious how many things can go wrong to a person who was staying in the hotel only for 2 nights.
For a hotel to not have a plan when these situations happen, to not have a process to manage hotel room assignments correctly, to have showers falling apart and basic room amenities not checked on a daily basis goes to show a lack of quality management.
I would think a million more times if I have to stay here again.Show More
