Mark D.
Yelp
This is the email that I sent to the Manager:
I will never, ever, stay at your hotel again, and I will tell every I can who's ever considering a hotel in Adelaide not to stay at your hotel.
You were charging me $230 a night for an inward facing room with no natural light whatsoever. There was some kind of opaque film covering the sole window. It was peeling off. There were curtains covering the film. They were dirty. The room was dark and dingy. When I opened the door and viewed the room, I could not believe my eyes and I immediately called reception. I told the counter man answering my call that I could not believe that you were charging $230 a night for a room in such a condition. He asked if I had booked on line, and I had said "yes" - that someone at my office had booked on my behalf. He said that the on-line description matched what I saw, to which I replied that, in all my experience staying in hotels all over the world, I had never seen a room in such a condition. You'd be overcharging to ask $80 a night for such a room. In my youth I stayed in hostels more appealing than the room I entered at your hotel.
In the end your counter man changed me to an outward facing room. When I checked out, the fee for the improved room was $20. That meant that for one single night I paid $250 for what was, in the second instance, a mediocre room for the money. In the future, when in Adelaide, I will stay instead, at the Playford, Pullman, Hilton or Peppers. At any of these other hotels I will get far, far more for the equivalent amount of money as I was charged at your hotel.
It's disgraceful that your company feels it can charge $230 a night for a frankly awful, dingy and dark, inward facing room with peeling film over windows covered with dirty curtains. It's audacious. You deserve to be run out of town by better hotels with better business models. I imagine that you have survived thus far only because your customer pool is naïve and doesn't know better. Even so, I can't see your hotel lasting long in a highly competitive market offering far better options for the money.
The other issue is your counter staff - not very polished, and the lack of them. When I went to check out at 10:45 a.m. there was a line-up from the counter to literally where the elevators open, a line that then extended in an "L" shape back towards the lobby and restaurant. Unbelievable.
I have never written a complaint to a hotel, but doing so is important in this case. I can't believe the audacity of your company charging what it charges for extremely dingy, unlit rooms, dirty and with no natural light whatsoever. It's shameful.