Do you know when you watch CSI
and they have to go to the crime scene at the seedy motel off the strip and
it’s always disgusting and seedy and gross?
The hotel where the serial killer dismembers someone in the bathroom and
there’s a crack head in the next room who is obsessively picking an open sore
who didn’t see or hear anything. When
the crime scene techs show up, they flash the ultra-violet light on the sheets
and there’s evidence of bodily fluids and they always say, “I doubt we are
going to be able to get any prints as this room hasn’t been cleaned well in a
very long time.” That hotel would be a
vast improvement compared to The Days Inn located in Dover, DE.
I am appalled that a national
chain, one that ironically advertises on television every half hour, spending
millions upon millions of dollars telling people how wonderful they make their
guests feel, would have such a wretched cesspool they call a hotel with their name
on it. My three day stay at the “hotel”,
and I use that word very lightly, began with the most inhospitable greeting
possible. I gave the woman at the desk
(identified only as being a little person as I didn’t ask her name) my name and
said I was checking in. Check out time
was 3 pm and I arrived around 3:30. She
rudely told me that my room wasn’t ready and continued preparing to go home for
the day. I politely asked what was being
done to ready my room or if there was another room she could put me in and she
was soooo entirely rude I was taken aback.
She didn’t tell me when my room would be ready, she didn’t make any efforts
to help me or even acknowledge my questions. She acted like I wasn’t even there. The other young lady, Jade, was helping
another guest and said she would be with me when finished.
The first room I was assigned the
bed wasn’t made. CLEARLY, no maid had
been in the room that day as it looked like someone had just fallen out of bed
and walked out the room. I asked the maid
who was standing outside the room when the room was going to be ready and she
told me that the room was cleaned and the bed just needed to be freshened
up. UGHHHH! She said that the bed just needed to be
freshened up, which means whomever spent the night in that room was sleeping in
a bed that . . . I can’t even think about it.
I went back to the desk and asked the young lady for another room. She gave me a room that had rust on the
refrigerator, a TV from 1984, furniture from 1973, and hadn’t been repaired or
updated since 1962, (I only wish I was exaggerating) save a disgusting yellow
paint job on the walls. Two room
assignments later, I finally settled in to my accommodations, intent to make
the best of a very, very bad situation.
If you plan on staying at the
Days Inn in Dover, don’t plan on having a reliable internet connection. After I
had settled in, I set up my laptop to get some work accomplished. I called Jade again, explaining this time
that I had done everything I knew how to do and couldn’t connect to the
internet. She physically came to the
room to assist me (which I thought was very nice of her) and had to reset the
router, which did allow me to connect . . . intermittently. There wasn’t a 30 minute period where I was
able to stay connected, and when connected, the connection speed was so slow it
was reminiscent of dial up at times.
My room had not been vacuumed as
there was evidence of debris on the floor.
Needless to say, I did not take my shoes off the entire time I was there
nor did I sit on the toilet my first night until I was assured that it was
clean. The fixtures and the furniture in
the room look NOTHING like the pictures on their website. There was no stainless steel fridge and the
door to the room looked like someone had used a crow bar trying to break
in. Everything in the room was broken
and old. To add insult to injury,
someone had seemingly urinated in the AC unit so the smell of pee came out when
it was turned on. The towel rack was
held to the wall with a loose screw and there was . . . no exaggeration . . . a
bloody washcloth in the safe. I called
the front desk and asked them to have someone come and remove it and she said
she would write a note for the cleaning staff to come remove it first thing in
the morning.
The cleaning staff showed up
shortly after 11 the next morning with no instructions to remove the bloody
washcloth. Her name was Pam and she was
very nice and apologized for the untidy state of the room. It wasn’t filthy, just not as clean as it
should have been for sure. She told me
that they were short staffed and she needed my towels to get them washed and
she would be back to clean my room later.
She did not come back to clean my room until after 5:30 pm. It seems that management, in their efforts to
be extremely cheap and greedy, intentionally did not schedule a full cleaning
staff that day and only scheduled TWO cleaning people for the entire hotel that
should have had five people on staff to accommodate the number of guests they
had the night before.
The guests in the hotel, some of
whom I can only assume were permanent residents, were of questionable character
and I did not venture out of my room after dark for fear I would be tied to the
back of one of the hundred or so pickup trucks there and dragged to my death. It sounded like there was a band rehearsing,
an actual heavy metal band practicing in one of the rooms. I can’t imagine there was anyone with a sound
system that they brought to the hotel for an overnight stay that could produce
that amount of volume so I can only assume that a band had set up rehearsal
space there with the management’s approval for some head banging fun.
One of the amenities was supposed
to be breakfast. There was a
hand-written sign saying there was no juice, there were two empty chafing dishes that I can only assume held some form of cooked food earlier in the morning
that no one had replaced, and there was a single, lone apple in a three tiered
basket of fruit. The counters hadn’t
been cleaned all morning and there were no plates at all. Suffice it to say, I didn’t eat anything there
and I went to the Dunkin Donuts just a short distance away for the remainder of
my stay for breakfast.
This hotel is not a 2 star
hotel. It is a -2 star hotel. I would give it a 0 star rating had it been
family owned and operated and not a national chain. This is a franchise of a chain that is owned
by a conglomerate with executives who are making hundreds of thousands of
dollars a year and allowing this toilet of a hotel remain open. It is my understanding that Days Inn, Dover
once had a contract with the Air Force for reservists to stay on their active
weekends and they lost it when a high ranking officer was subjected to staying
there. That means someone, several
someones in fact, in the corporate headquarters was informed of the deplorable
conditions of the hotel and they decided that it didn’t need updating, repair,
or demolition. They INTENTIONALLY put
images on the website to make the hotel look better than it is. They had the audacity to pay landscapers make
the front of the hotel look pleasing and to put up a perimeter of crepe myrtle
to hide the disrepair of hotel.
To the executives of Wyndam
Hotels: You greedy, capitalist
pigs. I will NEVER, as long as I live,
spend another dime in ANY of your hotel chains.
I find your level of greed and poor business practices to be
reprehensible. I will make sure that all
of my friends, family, and business associates know of my stay at your hotel
and I will implore them to never spend a dime at any of your hotel chains. I stay in hotels quite frequently. I spent almost two weeks in the Microtel Inn
in Dover about a month and a half ago and while it certainly wasn’t the best
accommodations I’ve ever had, it was clean and adequate (and in the process of being
updated which is why I was willing to be understanding of the transitional state
it was in). Your decision to let that
fetid, disgusting, hellhole called the Days Inn stay open without updating and
renovating it speaks volumes about how little you care about your guests. You have the money to update and renovate,
you simply choose to lie to and manipulate potential guests with pretty
pictures on the internet and deceptive landscaping. It doesn’t have to be a five star hotel but
it shouldn’t, under any circumstances, be as disgusting as it is. While I encountered two very nice employees,
the other two were so completely rude and incompetent as to completely negate
whatever positive impression I might have had.
I would suggest that you’ve made your bed and now you have to lie in it
but the bed is not made and the sheets are not clean.
Signed,
An extremely disgruntled
guest.
Scottie Lowe
800-441-1618
