Chris L.
Yelp
We stayed at the Lamp Liter Inn for a week while visiting California, we received a great welcome from the front desk and I am sad that I have to leave a 1 star review because the front desk staff was awesome. . .unfortunately their efforts do not make up for the issues we faced. I selected the Lamp Liter because it was cheap and close to the family we were there to visit. I know, in my review for Pacific Marina Inn, I spoke of matching your expectations to the cost of the room and, in doing so, I gave that business a rather high review in comparison to others. The difference between these two very similar properties is that the Pacific Marina Inn is at least functional.
The problems at the Lamp Liter started on the very first night. We were originally in room 277 (yes, I said originally, I'll get to that) on what I am going to call the "unrenovated" side of the property. The room was old and tired, you could see every year that it had been in service through the walls and floor, but, that is what we paid for. The issue is that the floor in that room is uneven somehow, especially in the transition between the shower room and the area that holds the sink. Our shower was also putting out an insane water pressure that we could not adjust, was set at chest level, and was dripping constantly with a tap tap tap tap tap tap tap sound that was driving us mad. In addition, the shower pan is inadequate for holding the water in so the bathroom floor got soaked and we had to use most of our towels to mop up the water that had escaped.
The second issue are the things that were not mentioned when I made my reservation and when we checked in. For one thing, the onsite restaurant (which is one of the reasons I booked here) was closed, and it looks like it has been closed for a while, for another our sliding glass door was screwed shut in multiple places so we couldn't open it! We wanted to open the curtains and the doors and just chill in our room with the fresh air and do some research and work but we couldn't! Why would the doors be screwed shut? If I want to let the air into my room I should be able to. Without usage of the doorway the only options you have for air are a tired fan and a heater that makes more noise than a Honda Civic with a blown muffler doing 40 mph at 5KRPM down a highway.
Lets move onto the room service. The individuals performing room service need to pay way more attention to what they are doing. They totally skipped our room when we had the "Maid Service Requested" sign up, which means we didn't get a refresh on the towels we used to clean the floor because of their shower, and the next day they were hammering on our door while we were trying to sleep with the "DO NOT DISTURB" sign displayed.
Like. . .hello? What's the point of giving us the ability to put up signage if you're just going to do whatever you want to do anyway? That's like one of the basic hallmarks of housekeeping, so that the guest occupying the room can control when it is ok and not ok for the staff to be present.
We came back from our gatherings one day to find that all we had access to was FREEZING cold water, mind you that at this point it is almost 1AM. I called the front desk and they said that a water pipe had blown and they had to move us to the other half of the property. Whoever I was talking to on the phone followed this up with "We'd been trying to reach you all day."
Umm. . .no you hadn't, that is a straight up lie.
The front desk had my cell phone number an email on file, and I did not receive any calls or any attempts to contact me through email, and now, at literally 1am we had to move to the other half of the site? Had there actually been an ATTEMPT to reach us they could have done so easily, we hadn't left Visalia that day, the whole time we were no more than 20 minutes away and we could have easily returned at any point to move rooms.
Then we got to the new room, the "renovated one"
First thing my wife notices? Spiders in the shower!
So I relocated the spiders outside the room and went to take a shower and the "new" shower in 225 was worse than the old one in 277! There was something wrong with the showerhead and it was sending water everywhere, once again flooding the floor out and requiring us to use our limited towels to clean it up.
We also noticed that, in the 1am rush, we had left a couple of items in the refrigerator of 277. I called the front desk and asked them if these items could be brought to the new room with the housekeeping service the next day since we would not be in as we were driving to Riverside in the morning. The person on the phone said "Yes, I will make a notation in the system and we'll get it over to 225."
We ended up spending the night in Riverside AND went to the Huntington, Monster HQ as well as my families house before returning to the Lamp Liter, we were gone for a full 2 days. . .no house keeping and no items.
I advise that you do not stay here.