AEleen F.
Yelp
Avoid this hotel unless you like bait-and-switch and NO Internet access.
The Oban Inn, which has a long standing good reputation, now bills itself as a boutique hotel. Unfortunately, the experience we had there recently was anything but special. We reserved the so-called Suite for one week. At check-in, we were required to pay the full amount for the entire stay, something which had never been mentioned previously. This was a huge red flag, but we foolishly ignored it. The room we got was not a suite in anything but name. In normal hotel terminology, it would be called a junior suite, as it did have a separate seating area, but there was no door/wall enclosing the bedroom as one would expect in a real suite.
The room itself was an extreme disappointment in that it lacked many amenities that one would expect from a Motel 6, let alone a high end property. The room is a very long rectangle divided approximately into thirds: seating area, bed area, bathroom. The bathroom is ridiculously large, with a tub (non-whirlpool) sitting in the middle of a vast tiled space, which also includes the toilet. However, the bathroom lacks simple things like towel racks near the double sinks. Also, the closet is off the bathroom, is miniscule in size, and has a door that does not cover the entire opening so that your clothes steam whenever you shower.
The room is cluttered with way too much furniture: 8 chairs (including one with ottoman in the bathroom) and a couch. This means that there is no usable place to put one's suitcases because all of the floor space has something on it. This is especially problematic because other than the closet in the bathroom, there is no place to store clothing -- what appears to be a dresser in the center of the sleeping area actually holds a small refrigerator, the coffee pot and the safe, but has no drawers. The only other storage spaces are a few tiny drawers in the bathroom under the sinks (perhaps 2" deep) and a couple of drawers which barely open in an old and worn-out desk.
When we asked about the lack of storage, we were assured by the owner that there were full size drawers in the bathroom under the sink. In fact, there is an empty space there, and no amount of persuading could convince her that the alleged drawers did not in fact exist.
The room is also overflowing with tacky, fake objects d'art, taking up most of the space on the various side tables. When we asked the owner to remove some of these so that we would have space for some of our articles, she was insulted, presumably because she is personally responsible for the hoard of tacky decorations. The standard response of both the owner and staff to all of our concerns was "this is a boutique hotel," as though that explained the lack of basic amenities. In fact, their attitude towards customers is exactly the opposite of what we expect and have received at genuine boutique hotels.
Finally, the hotel claims to have wireless Internet access but we got virutally no bandwidth in our room (~1 page/5 minutes!), supposedly the best in the hotel. Reception is no better in the lobby, library or any other public area we could check. A fee for Internet service would be annoying, but still would be much better than no Internet at all.
So, all in all, for about $400/night, you get a room with the closet off the bathroom, nowhere to put clothes other than that closet, no floor space on which to put an open suitcase, no Internet, and a defensive, hostile and unhelpful proprietor.
