Worst Night of Sleep and no thanks to Management
By A Yahoo! Contributor, 4/4/11
We have stayed at the Esther Lee for several years now and this will be our last and final visit. We booked one of two available rooms and it happened to be on the bottom floor. Everything seemed to be going well until 1:00 a.m. when the tenants upstairs for whatever reason continually walked back and forth across the floor which squeaked all through the night. I don't want to understate how much foot traffic we were hearing so when i say continuously, I mean it sounded like they were high heals on a Models Runway, one after the other after the other,, through out the entire night. There was a moment when it settled down around 2:00 a.m., but then picked up again by 2:30 and by 4 a.m. we had enough. My husband called the front desk and no one answered. Frustrated, he hit the ceiling twice and it quieted down for half an hour. It then picked up again until about 6. We were exhausted and crashed for a couple of hours. Husband went up to speak to the front desk people as soon as they opened. Tthey seemed quite sympathetic about it and said that Manager Mark would be in within a couple of hours and would get in touch. We waited and what happened next sealed our last visit.
He called down and said that he would comp our next visit $25. Husband said okay, but then we about it and went to speak to him. I stated that this was our spring vacation which is 1 day due to work schedule and $25 comping doesn't feel like much compensation. We expected half or next visit on them due to longevity of customer loyalty. Then the snippiness came out. He said that he felt like we blamed him, I said not him, but he is the Manager to whom we should bring out concerns to. Then he blamed different sleep schedules on the problem. Last time I checked...1:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. is pretty unilateral on sleep time. We told him how exhausted we felt after no sleep through the entire night and he commented back, "well I see that you stayed the whole night and used the room." This was not the people friendly Esther Lee we remember and seeing the mentality we were dealing with, it became apparent that telling him to keep our $25.00 comp and letting him know we would not be coming back was the better choice for us. I could hear him mumbling under his breath while he walked around toward the counter. I'm not sure where the professionalism went, but it saddens me that it was handled this way. I hope that the owners of the Esther Lee read this and reconsider who they hire to represent their hotel because poor management goes along way and voices travel. Our experience will be shared.