Paul L.
Yelp
This is a strange story that starts with not being able to see what I was doing in the bathroom. The tub & toilet area of the bathroom had one small recessed ceiling light in it, which was about as bright as a candle. I really couldn't see what I was doing in the shower, or otherwise. I shrugged that off.
When my wife wanted to make some tea at the end of the day, we discovered that the room had no coffee pot. It also had no cups, glasses, or ice bucket (despite the fact that each floor has an ice machine and soda machines). I shrugged that off.
We did not bother to have the room serviced each day, as we are pretty tidy. However, when I called housekeeping after a couple of days and asked for four clean towels, they promptly and cheerfully delivered three. The wife and I get along pretty good, so we made it work with three. I shrugged that off.
We ate breakfast every morning at the small cafe near the entrance: the food was OK (what can you do to an egg?), but the service was marginal, w/ a side order of neglect. Breakfast is not why we went to Vegas, so I shrugged that off.
We ate one evening at their fancy restaurant with other members of our group, and the food was very good. When we tried to use our discount coupons that were distributed to each of us at check-in (coupons that were specific to THAT restaurant), we were told that we could only use a maximum of three coupons; there were four groups / four coupons in our party. After much kvetching, some of the ladies in the group convinced the server to relent, and accept all four coupons. I shrugged that off.
After staying there for three nights, it was time to go home. We had driven our Mercedes Benz Sprinter conversion van, called a Winnebago Touring Coach. It's about the same size as an Amazon van. We parked it each night in their surface lot (too tall to get into the parking garage), and we would regularly shuttle our clothing and other items back and forth to our dimly-lit room, where we showered and slept. On the morning of our departure I was shocked and somewhat dismayed to find a Palace Station Parking Violation Notice entitled 72 HOURS TOWING NOTICE affixed to my windshield (see attached). The form featured a list of violation categories that the security guy could select from, but none of them applied to our van. In the notes section, he had written in "Possible Sleepers". WOW....Possible Sleepers?! I DID NOT shrug this off.
Thank God I found this notice before they had my van towed.
Although we were trying to get on the road home, I took a few minutes to bring this to the attention of the hotel manager: Carlos. Upon reading the notice, Carlos was quick to point the finger at the security detail, and told me that he had nothing to do with that aspect of the hotel's operation. I must have asked Carlos the same question at least five times: Who manages these security folks? As many times as I asked, Carlos gave me that many non-answers. When I got good and frustrated with him, I asked him to provide me with contact information for HIS up-link in the chain of command. To no surprise, I got the same series of creative non-answers.
I got home later that night, and decided to let it simmer a day before I would try to contact corporate management to discuss my grievances. I called the Station Casinos main phone number, and explained that I wanted to talk to someone higher in the food chain than Carlos. After waiting on hold for a bit, my call was routed to......you guessed it.....Carlos. I hung up and called back. The same phone attendant, Gina, then transferred me to the Corporate office. The call rang about 20 times without being answered, and was then disconnected. I called back and got a different phone attendant who was very polite and who explained that the corporate folks had likely gone home for the day. She took my contact information and assured me that one of the corporate managers would contact me tomorrow.
Since I retired, my travels typically do not require me to stay in hotels. That said, my recollection is that upon registration, most places used to ask me to register my vehicle's license plate, presumably so they could discern whether any given vehicle in their lot was associated with a guest. Being as this hotel is a casino, I could see where that approach would be only partially effective at tracking parking lot activity. However, there must be a better way to manage this situation than threatening to tow a guest's vehicle. Even though many of the cars in the lot belong to folks who are not hotel guests, recording the plate numbers of those that ARE guests would preclude the unnecessary anxiety and aggravation that I suffered as a result of the threat of being towed.
I look forward to hearing back from Palace Casinos management.
In the mean time, if you have read my detailed report you should now ask yourself if this is the Las Vegas experience that you want to have.