Don't Stay Here
By A Yahoo! Contributor, 8/15/06
My girlfriend arrived on Wednesday and discovered that the toilet was continuously running, despite her not having used it. She called the front desk, and the hotel sent a gentleman up to check the toilet. She advised him that she wasn't sure what was wrong with the toilet, but she added that she noticed a lot of water on the floor of the bathroom, and she didn't know where it originated from. She suggested that it might have come from the toilet, or may just have been from the cleaning before she checked in. The employee checked out the toilet and found that the water on the floor was actually spewing from a pipe connected to the toilet. The man then told her that the maintenance worker had just left for the day, and that she would have to wait until morning to have the repairs done. In the interim, the man turned off the water to the toilet and told her to "just turn the water back on every time you want to use the toilet." Obviously unimpressed with this arrangement, she asked if she could transfer to another room. The gentleman said that the hotel was booked for the night, and this was not a possibility. The gentleman then left.
After speaking to me on the phone, my girlfriend and I decided that we needed to see if anything else could be done, because hand-operating a toilet was not our ideal arrangement. She went down to the front desk and spoke with a woman who she thinks was named Ty or Tys or something similar to that. We asked for the hotel to compensate us in one of three ways: either (1) move us to a different room, (2) monetary compensation, or (3) call the maintenance guy back and get the toilet fixed ASAP.
My girlfriend was told that we could not move to another room because all the rooms in the hotel were booked, and they were completely booked throughout the dates we had paid for. When my girlfriend suggested that we stay one night in the defunct room, and then move to a different room the next day, Ty said "you don't want to jinx yourself; the other rooms might have something wrong with them too." This was quite startling, and got us wondering just how many rooms at Vintage Court had problems as severe as a non-working toilet.
We did not think it was worthwhile to complain about the other issues because, while all were extremely unprofessional and inconvenient, they paled in comparison to the lack of adequate bathroom facilities, which didn't even elicit a formal apology from management. This is in light of the fact that we have had far more mundane incidents at other hotels (in the same city, in fact) where management was so apologetic that we received one night of our stay for free. Plus, that compensation had occurred without us even having to ask.
Any reasonable hotel would know of having peeling wallpaper and holes in the linens. In fact, the hole in our shower floormat was showing when it was neatly folded at the edge of the shower. Moreover, the bugs in the bathroom are hard to miss, especially when we noticed them during our daily showers, and the maids were in the bathroom daily as well. It is hard to believe that the hotel was unaware of these things, particularly since they are a boutique hotel with very few rooms. Of course, this same logic should apply to running or leaking toilets.