J.R. O.
Yelp
The hotel is only about ten years old and yet there are so many things wrong, you'd think it was still a hundred year-old brewery. It was my birthday, so we decided to go all out and get a Baron Terrace Suite. At first look, we thought it was great. Well-appointed and lots of room. It wasn't until we went to bed at 2am that we realized that when the heat/AC kicked on, it was so loud that it made sleeping virtually impossible. 18 feet above the bed and the noise was so loud, that I was able to record the audio on my phone, which noted the sound at 80 decibels. That level of noise is the equivalent of standing next to a running lawn mower. Since we went to bed late, there were no maintenance people available to check the problem. By the time the morning rolled around, we were worn out due to sleep deprivation. Keenan, the G.M. knocked $100 off the $500 bill. He also said to let him know the next time we were staying at the hotel and he would make sure everything was perfect.
The next time we stayed was this past New Years' Eve. We booked a Baron Loft Suite and a One Bedroom Suite, for my son and his wife. It's important to note that these were prepaid online bookings of around $1,700. As NYE approached, my son had a family issue and wouldn't be able to make the trip. Since it was still prior to NYE, I was able to re-book one of the rooms.
Without thinking about what I was doing, I stupidly re-booked the Baron Loft Suite for my birthday and chose to stay in the One Bedroom Suite. NYE is our wedding anniversary, so this was a really dumb move. The room was plain. Plain as a Mormon honeymoon. Plain as dry toast. No art or decoration of any kind. Just four gray-green walls. The room lighting was so ridiculously dim in that you had to struggle to see anything. And it wasn't meant to be some kind of "romantic lighting". It was that terrible green-fluorescent color. My wife called it "prison cell lighting". Oh and by the way, the way Keenan made sure our stay was "perfect" was to put a crappy bag of candy and nuts in our room. This time, the room was small enough for us to notice that when the heat came on, it was pretty loud. Not as loud as the Terrace Suite but still quite annoying. We called down to the desk and asked to move but they allegedly had no other rooms available. Normally I would believe that, but our floor was strangely empty. We only saw two other people on the floor as we came and went.
Maintenance came up and told us that the rooms are all that way. That they leave the heat low so that it doesn't come on when no guests are in the rooms and that the noise tends to go away after a few hours. It did get quieter, but the noise never went away. More along the lines of someone vacuuming next door. We could sleep, but our NYE intake of alcohol was definitely a mitigating factor.
Check out time - on NEW YEARS' DAY - was 11am! Seriously?! No late check out on New Years' Day?! As we left, there were lots of people in the tight lobby space. We noticed that the two women behind the desk were clearly stressed. I would call them "surly" in their attitude toward the customers.
After our stay, we got a call from someone reviewing our re-booked reservation. She told us that because the room was booked online, we weren't allowed to re-book the room for another date! We argued that we'd already prepaid the room, about customer service and our previous bad experiences at the hotel. That we travel from Chicago to stay there and that we'd given them what would have been three chances to get it right and they never did. We also noted that nowhere on their website (nor on our paid receipt) does it state that online bookings are non-changeable.
She said she'd check into it and get back to us. When she called back, she said, to "help us out" they would be willing to move the date but would have to charge the regular room rate of $900 for the two nights. Wow. Thanks so much for helping is out. We lose our prepaid $900 and have to pay you an additional $900 to very likely have the same lousy experience!
I got a call today from Keenen, the G.M. with no business acumen. It seems that the girl who called, had arbitrarily re-booked the room for this weekend and he wanted to know if we were going to show up. I told him that not only were we not going to be there but that we'd never be coming back again. No apologies for the experience. No apology for literally stealing our money and giving us nothing in return. Just a snide, "that sounds good! You have a nice day!"
The Brewhouse Inn and Suites is expensive. It's supposed to be a boutique hotel that has top-notch facilities and would presumably take all pro-active measures to serve their customers. All we really asked for was a quiet, properly operating room. What we got were badly maintained rooms, bad customer service, bad attitude and a hotel that stole $900 of our money.
I will never stay here again. I'd suggest you find somewhere else to go.