Pretty hotel but AWFUL service/attitude
By A Yahoo! Contributor, 05/03/08
Boy, what an experience to forget! We adore Key West but our experience at the Marquesa can only be described as a comedy of errors, a real episode of Fawlty Towers and trust me, if you’re looking for service (I mean ANY service!), look elsewhere! We paid around $3750 for a 10 night stay and ended up with our own little piece of Nazi Germany! Here are the raw facts:
1. Arrived at 3:00am after a nightmare 28 hour journey from London. The best welcome the Night Manager could muster was “I thought you weren’t coming”!
2. Awoke at 11 that morning and called for a coffee. “The machine has been shut down – you can go get a coffee somewhere 2 blocks away”! This is a hotel which "offers 24 hour room service"!
3. I take my laptop to the office for safekeeping (they said I could). The guy looks at me like I’m mad and asks me why I should want to leave it with them and what the problem is with leaving it in the room!
4. The next morning – at 6:45am – the phone rings, wakes us up – and it’s a wrong number – a call meant for our next door neighbour! When we ask the Night Manager why he’d put the call through to us (by mistake), he starts shouting…..”If the caller asks for Room xxx, that’s what they’re going to get”! When asked what name the caller asked for, he says “they didn’t, they just asked for the room number”. Is there any decent hotel in the world which will put through a call just asking for a room number and not a resident name – and at 6.45am??
5. That evening, we ask the same Night Manager for a takeout menu. He asks, aggressively “What do you want, the whole book?” and then does an about face and tells us there’s only one company which delivers after 11pm anyway!
6. We’ve had enough – enough of being polite and getting short shrift so we ask to speak to the owner – she’s very sympathetic, agrees with everything we say, apologises profusely and assures us that “things will change”. They don’t. They get worse!
7. We have a private sundeck. It gets messy – tea/coffee cups, plates etc. on the table from room service. Housekeeping staff walk past the deck all day long and ignores it. When I complain to the Housekeeping Supervisor, she tells me she didn’t want to disturb us (??) and then I hear that management are unhappy that I even mentioned it! So, you get room service and you clear it up yourself – 8 hours later - and you’re paying $350+ per night?!!
8. We have aircon in the room but if we dare have the door open (to go in and out of the room), staff appear instantaneously (hiding behind a bush?) and tell us to close the door! On 3 separate occasions when the door is open and we’ve switched the aircon off (we should have to do this?), we go to turn it back on again and find that it’s been switched off in the boiler room!! 3 times this happens and each time they deny having switched it off, only for us to then see a member of staff sneak into the boiler room and, hey presto, it comes back on!
9. We ask to see the owner again. No show! We’re now 8-9 days in and nobody has ever said “Hi”, “Welcome”, “Is everything OK?”.
10. Checkout - we ask to pay the bill. The owner is there. When I try to talk to her, the Manager comes out, stands in front of her, hands on hips and tells me she doesn’t want to talk to me!! She starts crying – very professional – and he reluctantly offers me $50 dollars against a $3750 bill, for 11 days of aggravation!
The property is pretty and clean although our $290 plus tax per night Deluxe room wasn’t exactly spacious but boy, do you want to be treated like this? The hotel is always full (so they don’t care) and it’s quite clear that the snooty, stuffy, rude staff “come first” and paying guests come a very poor second. Great, great shame.
