My review:
Bad:
- Soap dispenser at sink empty (had to get bar soap from front desk)
- Shower dripping constantly
- Loud bathroom exhaust fan doesn’t actually do anything (mirror totally fogged after short shower, had to open bathroom door to defog)
- One of the beds makes a metal squeaking sound whenever the guest moves on it
- Mediocre pillows (worse than last Red Roof Inn we were in)
- Mattresses that don’t absorb any motion (partner tosses and turns, you feel every bit of it)
- Mediocre ventilation (over 800 PPM CO2 in room in the morning, breakfast area spiked from around 400 to nearly 700 PPM after just a few minutes of people talking over breakfast)
- Flow rate from bathroom sink is violently heavy and requires ridiculously careful manipulation to reduce to a reasonable level
- Overheard another guest telling the front desk their room was full of bedbugs (yikes!)
- Only one variety of milk available for breakfast cereal, and it’s not labeled (is it skim? 2%? whole?)
Good:
- Nice staff
- Very clean
- Free breakfast!
- Parking no problem
- Nice shower head (except for the dripping!)
- Good towels (absorbent, not rough and scratchy) and sheets
- Good, free WiFi
Their response:
Dear Mr. Kamens,
Thank you for taking the time to tell us about your experience at the Red Roof Inn Batavia. I am sorry that your experience did not meet your expectations. Please accept our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience during your stay.
At Red Roof, it is our intention to have your confidence in our abilities to prevent similar problems in the future.
The Front Desk Attendant is at the front desk at all times, to assist guests with whatever their needs may be. If, you would have ask for a different room. They might have been able to help you. If, your shower was dripping, The front desk attendant could have call someone to come and fix it. She could have definitely got you different pillows, you just needed to ask. The same with the milk in our {free} breakfast area, all you needed to do was ask, we would have been happy to tell you. There are fans in all the rooms, including breakfast area. If, you needed more air circulation, an adjustment could have been made.
What you heard from other guest about bedbugs was not true. The room the guest was in was “deep cleaned” two days before they entered into that room, and no one else used that room, but them. We actually believe the guest brought the bugs with them. The room was cleaned and inspected after they left and no bugs were found.
Thank you
Very truly yours,
Tabatha Torcello
Red Roof Management
This is just so bad. It’s basically “Let’s give the customer a false apology and then explain in an incredibly passive-aggressive way why all of their complaints are invalid.”
→ The hotel was sold out, so they could not in fact have given me another room if I had complained about the problems in our room. That’s just an ass-covering lie.
→ We arrived at the hotel at nearly 10:30pm, there was certainly no one available at that time to fix a dripping shower head at that time.
→ It’s unlikely that they had any better pillows sitting in a storage room that they could have given us to replace the mediocre pillows in the room. It’s not that the pillows in our particular room were uniquely bad; it’s that this Red Roof Inn chooses to provide guests with mediocre pillows.
→ All this misses the point that when you arrive at a hotel late at night and your room has problems that could and should have been prevented in advance by proper upkeep, the hotel has already failed to provide acceptable service. No one wants to deal with switching rooms late at night.
→ Their response about the milk at breakfast ignores my point about there being only one variety. At most hotels that provide breakfast, there are different varieties of milk available for different guests’ tastes.
→ Regarding their claim that they could have “adjusted” the air circulation if I’d only asked them, first of all I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit, and second of all even if it’s true, it once again misses the point, which is that guests should not need to ask for their rooms or the breakfast area to have good ventilation; this is something that should always be provided to everyone as a basic public-health amenity.
→ Given all of the other weasel-words in their response, I don’t have a lot of confidence that their response about the alleged bedbugs in another guest’s room is true. I certainly would not put it past them to lie about that, given their unwillingness to take responsibility for anything else I complained about.
