Long hard road out of our Hotel
Written: Aug 21 '01 (Updated Aug 21 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Uhm..Sometimes the vending machine screwed up and you'd get bonus M&M's
Cons: The staff are Cons themselves
The Bottom Line: I'd have to say best suited for Adventure travel, since there wasn't Third World travel. Roaches Check In, but they Don’t Check out (cause they live there year round)
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| MagickCat's Full Review: Days Inn |
Day’s in where the staff goes through your luggage; the safety safe is looser then the front desk clerk and your sheets aren’t the only things crawling.
A tale of a my family’s fabulous Disney World Vacation spent booked in what must have been either once a hooker’s palace or the crappiest place on earth. After a few years of saving, my parent and I had taken 2 weeks off to see Florida and through the wisdom of our pimp’ing travel agent, I believe her name was Suzanne...
(Who had also booked equally craptastic seating on flights where we were kicked off for other passengers, served by nazi flight attendants who ignored our pleas for water whilst they served everyone else, separated and were crammed onto a smaller plane then we had chartered...I’m just guessing that cargo would have had better treatment, I mean the only thing they didn’t do was loose our luggage.)
Anyhow, Suzanne had arranged for our entire trip to be spent in Kissimmee Florida (Which I still think should be KissimeMonieeG’bye)
"to avoid the crowd and be able to get into the park gates"
She had even shown us a brochure of the Motel because she wanted us to feel good about our trip. And it looked pretty nice. So us three little Canadians left the sanctity of our Igloo and three transfers later, one hour sweltering in the Memphis airport finally arrived and were shuttled from the airport early in the AM, through the wilderness of Florida’s open high ways where we passed swamps and even a deer. Could it have been an omen of bambi? Was Walts blessing upon our trip? Sure the flight had been traumatic at best but at least we had that brochure, that golden ticket to a problem free vacation.
Hotel after Hotel the shuttle stopped dropping passengers off to the smiling faces of bell hops in smart outfits who gladly picked up their luggage and ushered them into the air conditioned lobby’s with dazzlingly patterned carpets. We were on the last of the list to be dropped off and after seeing so many classy looking establishments I assumed we’d at least be staying in something a little more desirable then the Motel 6 fair.
Superior Exterior =Interior Inferior?
As we pulled up to the very last stop we and another damned family were greeted with a peach stucco building that looked somewhat like an adobe or mud brick temple like complex. Actually it was impressive on the outside and looked pretty nice, fitting in with the climate and other architectural Floridian things. The lobby was cool and had a miniature fountain inside along with a typical tiki looking ceiling fan, however as we waited for the bumbling clerk to give us our room (which he had problems confirming etc) I got the distinct feeling that this fellow could have been a replacement for Manwell on Faultily Towers. But he no learnted good English from a book. Finally after some phone calls he said yes in fact we did book the room (gee that was some news flash) and gave up the key.
We went outside carrying our bags past a grungy looking pool and found our room on the bottom corner of the fortress like plaza. The pool and the clerk should have been our first clues as to what lay behind the mystery prize door.
It was dark, it was dingy and it was dirty
The light switch panel was cracked so after feeling around the wall (regretfully) for a few moments we finally got a lampworking. I wonder how much of the furniture the salvaged from a garage sale.
The carpet had huge stains on it, it looked pretty rough, the bedspreads were so worn that the patterns had begun to fade…the walls were well I won’t go there, but we had been promised a non-smoking room and it was reeking of tobacco and it’s yellowed tar facade. And that was just at the first few glances. I knew by the look on my mother’s face who works at our hospital and is used to some pretty foul sights that this room was less then hygienic. We’ve been forced on other trips to stay in motels that look well like they’ve been furnished from the 70’s and are fugly but no where have I seen that amount of blatant grime and uncare.
Not being terribly picky my Dad decided that this is just a room we aren’t vacationing in the room, it’s just a place to sleep and put our stuff.
I think everyone’s opinion of that changed once we pulled back the bed sheets, or rather sheet. Dad got pretty angry and headed off to the lobby, Mom just cringed. After demanding to see other rooms we found out that they were all like this one and our travel agent couldn’t get us booked anywhere else.
The bathroom was nasty as well; its base was cracked and whenever anyone flushed it’d make this damned noise like a banshee being sucked down its copper pipes. The tiles were broken in the bathtub and I believe though I wouldn’t look that there was some sort of large bugs living behind it. Having a shower in there was about as bad as using a service station bathroom. Well at least no one hogged it.
Anyways we had our room cleaned the first day before we would even sleep in it, and unfortunately all they did was remake the bed without changing the sheets and throw a few more towels into the bathroom.
Good Nights Sleep on Well used Mattress
Like I said above, probably once was a streetwalkers palace. I’m not sure how you could actually stand sleeping on bed sheets that itched, I was afraid to be honest to touch the bed spread and spent most of the night curled up in a ball. Hell I’m not sure how I spent 10 nights sleeping there without going slightly batty. If you’ve ever had an old horsehair war blanket or wool sweater then you’d probably get the idea. I was glad when morning would come because if we got our wake up call then my skin could stop crawling.
I wont complain that the room above us was noisy since that was our mistake for accepting a spot on the main floor.
The air conditioner though, rattled and was basically running on its last legs. Out of the three settings only one worked and blasted really cold onto my side of the mattress. No point in complaining since nothing ever got fixed period.
Morning Wake up Calls
Generally the staff did manage to pick up the phone and wake us up at the time we requested so we could get on the tour bus, however they did miss us on the list at least one or two times consequently making us very short on time.
Nothing’s ever Free
With your nights stay at the Days Inn, you’re entitled to a free Continental breakfast hosted in a empty room. Yeah so that translates to: one bunch of bananas, a bag of oranges, a box of Costco muffins and pastry laid out on the table with the apparent attempt to feel a whole hotelful of guests. Usually by the time anyone got up there you could probably grab a nice cup of Styrofoam apple juice or coffee. If you didn’t make it on time, its either tough luck or go down to the restaurant.
Dinning, Oil-By products at there best
At the Days Inn which we stayed at there was also a restaurant attached to the hotel called I think, the Sun Rise, or early rise something like that. The cooks must have taken lessons from the Days Inn cleaning staff. I mean it wasn’t bad food, it wasn’t dirty but it wasn’t what you’d call high quality. And by that I don’t mean high quality as in snobby hoidy toidy food, but er can we say cheese wiz smeared on a cracker?
The few days that we had something there, well I was surprised at the dessert as even though some components of it had separated or gelled it tasted not too bad for petroleum by products. I can really only compare this dinning experience to the restaurant in Zellers or maybe a place like K-Mart. Usually we just walked across the highway to checkers or some other place to eat.
The Cleaners
Why I bring them up is not just to nail down the point that these room maids were not only the laziest bunch of sows on earth, but that they were also thieves. I have a lot of respect for most hotel maids and my aunt even worked as one, but the Days Inn ones proved that you should always lock your belongings up.
At first we had wondered why there was an iron safe bolted down in our room, we had thought it sort of strange. But on the second day of our stay we had gone to Epcot and left our bags on the furniture, I had specifically zipped my case up and laced the latch and buckle as I had taken to, to make sure nothing crawled into my clothing while we were out. There were these lizards that made this chirping sound which we had thought were bugs.
Anyways when we get back for the night, I find not only is my suitcase open, all my clothing has been "touched" and gone through. Pretty upsetting I thought. Nothing that I know of was taken but the idea that someone had actually had the nerve to go and open it up, look through my stuff and then without even bothering to close it, left it like that for me to see. I was upset and because of this we began locking anything small enough to fit in the safe up. Perhaps stealing was the maids idea of cleaning up
Long hard road out of a Motel
The Motel 6 may not be fancy but at least its clean, which can’t be said for Days Inn. I don’t see how it can even call its self an Inn. Florida was fun our vacation was still great but I’m sure if we had have stayed somewhere else it would have been more memorable for better reasons then a crappy room and floozy staff. About the only good thing about Days Inn was the pool which was closed half the time and otherwise still falling apart.
I would thank Suzanne, our travel agent for her concern for our money and her heartfelt attempt at milking it out, not to mention putting us in a tourist trap.
The most ironic thing is we stayed there because we thought we were getting a deal, but later we found out that had we just paid 20 more dollars we could have stayed at a fancy actual Hotel. Thank you Suzanne.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
MagickCat
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Location: Canada
Reviews written: 44
Trusted by: 10 members
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