Hotel from Hell

We're having fun in Amarillo, and I'll post more about that later (including the insanely scary water slide Ella made me go down...twice!), but for now I have to tell you why you should never never ever stay at the Homewood Suites in Amarillo.

It should have been a sign that I had trouble making the reservation to begin with. When I made our reservation online, it gave me an error message with a phone number to call. So I call the number (Hilton's corporate reservation number), and they inform me that the kind of room we want (a two-room suite with two queen beds) does not exist in Amarillo. Period. Not that they're full, but that there aren't any. So I start looking at other hotels online when I get a confirmation email thanking me for my reservation. So I call to find out if I do have a reservation and for what kind of room. This time they say I do have a reservation for a two-room suite with two queen beds. Fabulous.

So on Friday we get to Amarillo in time for lunch, and then we do a little shopping before we head to the hotel. By the time we get to the hotel, Emilia is asleep in her carseat, so I send Ryan in to check in, thinking he'll be right back out. Twenty minutes later he returns. (Perhaps it should have been a sign that he had to wait for the woman in front of him to finish chewing out Crystl (yes, that's how her name was spelled, and yes, I know I'm using parentheses within parentheses), the girl working at the front desk.)

We park the car and find the room. I'm holding the sleeping baby, and our plan is for me to stay at the hotel with Emilia while Ryan and Ella go to the mall. Great plan...except our door won't open. Ryan goes to the front desk, where Crystl says, "That's strange. Let me reprogram it." He comes back, and it still won't open. He goes back again. Crystl says, "That's strange," and calls maintenance. Maintenance comes and can't get the door open, either. All this time I'm holding 23 1/2 pounds of dead weight, that is, until she wakes up. So much for Emilia's nap. Finally the maintenence guy changes the batteries in the card reader and half an hour later we get in our room.

Fast forward to Saturday. After lunch, Emilia falls asleep in the car, so we decide Ryan will stay at the hotel while the girls rest and I run to the mall. He calls when Emilia wakes up, and I come back to the hotel. In the meantime, he sees housekeeping headed toward the room, so he and the girls go to the lobby to wait while they clean the room. I get there as housekeeeping is finishing up the room next door. I tell them to give us five minutes to change clothes, and we would be out of the room. We get ready and go to the water park. This was at 1:45.

At 6:15, we return to discover our room hadn't been cleaned. Ryan goes down to the front desk, hoppin' mad. The manager tells him he will have someone there in ten minutes. Now we had been planning on getting take-out and eating in the room because the girls were exhausted. But since housekeeping was on the way (or so we thought) we decide to go eat at Johnny Carino's. Then we go to the mall to get Ella some Dippin' Dots for dessert. By the time we get back to the hotel, it is 9:15. Ryan and Ella drop off me and Emilia and go to Walmart to get Ella some soy milk.

Emilia and I walk into the room to see that it still hadn't been cleaned. Now ordinarily, this really wouldn't have been that big of deal. However, Ella had had an accident the night before so we had stripped her bed. Housekeeping had picked up our dirty towels that morning, so we had no towels. And our trash cans were overflowing with stinky diapers.

So, baby on my hip, I head down to the front desk, where the assistant manager tells me there's no one to clean the room, so they had just left us clean towels and emptied the trash. (Not true...they hadn't done either.) I demand to speak to the manager, who finally calls over from the Hilton Garden Inn next door. I chew him out and get a promise that the room will be clean in ten minutes. (Yeah, right.)

Emilia and I head back to the room, where I try to get her to fall asleep, all the while fielding calls from the front desk. Maintenence will be there in ten minutes, twenty minutes, blah, blah, blah. I did eventually get him to comp us for one night of our hotel stay.

Ryan and Ella return, Ella can barely keep her eyes open, and no one has cleaned the room. At 10:15, Ryan goes down to the front desk to get sheets and towels so we can go to bed. Twenty minutes later he returns with towels and sheets that are too small for the bed. He somehow rigs it so Ella can go to bed....at 10:45, four and a half hours after we first complained.

And that, my friends, is why you should never never ever stay at the Homewood Suites in Amarillo.

We have one more night here. I'll keep you posted on whether or not our room gets cleaned today.