Couldn't Breathe!!!
By A Yahoo! Contributor, 12/19/05
Pros: Friendly staff, large rooms, convenient location, great price!
Cons: When booking our reservation, we clearly requested a non-smoking room. Upon check in, when we double-checked on the non-smoking status of the room, the front desk clerk asked us to give him back our room key. He then told us that our room would be ready in about 20 minutes. As soon as we entered our room, we were hit with an extremely potent dose of air freshener mixed with strong tobacco smoke. All the windows were shut tight, so the effect felt like a fumigation was occuring. It was so strong even a smoker may have balked. We were told that there were no other rooms available. We opened all windows and the glass door and informed the staff that we would have to let the room air out for a few hours. We had to take our luggage back to our car because the room was not secure with the glass door open. When we returned, the room still smelled unpleasant, but not as toxic as it smelled upon our initial entry. The entire room had an unclean smell, look, and feel to it.
We are not snobs and often stay in modestly priced accommodations. We understand that you get what you pay for, but the overspraying of the air freshener and the lack of cleaning gave the room the creepy feel of a seedy roadside truckstop motel. Never been to one of those, but that's what I imagine!
We were told that the room was supposed to be non-smoking, but that they couldn't control every guest's actions. Fair enough, but we would have appreciated and respected honesty at the front desk. If they had explained that there had been smoking in our room, we could have waited a few hours while they aired out our room, perhaps with a few of those industrial fans. They could have cleaned it too! It would have spared us from having to lug our bags and from having to breathe the very strong toxic smell.
The staff members were pleasant and apologized for our inconvenience, but management was unresponsive and unapologetic to our VERY POLITE post-stay phone calls.
We had planned to spend a lot of our vacation relaxing in our room. Instead, we spent most of our vaction sightseeing to avoid the room... We did see more of Maui than we've ever seen before!!! Maui was BEAUTIFUL as always!!!