…at the Microtel Motel.
Remember the old John Fogerty song where he was “stuck in Lodi again?” Well, we spent the weekend in Lodi for a club soccer tournament.
Turns out that Lodi is not such a bad little town. It has a quaint little downtown, a number of wineries (which we did not stop at) and the requisite shopping center with Target, Starbucks, Quiznos, Pantera, Chilis, etc. In fact there were 4 different Starbucks we found while we were there.
The problem is we were stuck at the Microtel Inn right off of I-5. We came in with reasonably low expectations–this was obviously not going to be the Ritz Carlton. I booked the reservation on the internet, which gave me a choice of rooms, rates (discount for AAA), etc. Very simple.I did pay a little extra for a “suite”, which I figured was the type of divided room w/a door you get at Embassy Suites and other similar places. However, it turns out that for the Microtel Lodi, a room becomes a suite by removing one of the double beds, replacing it with a sofabed, adding a small cube fridge and a microwave, and renaming it a suite.
The desk clerk, who was unfailingly polite, first asked me to sign the checkin form before filling in the daily rate. Good think I didn’t do this, because he had an incorrect rate. After finding out that their version of the word suite was different than ours, I had another discussion with said clerk. He informed me that that really WAS a suite. And, besides, if we wanted a regular double room, he was out of those and was therefore upgrading all of the other double requests to “suites” for the lower price.
This did not compute, so I asked if he could then give us the lower rate, since what we had was more like a double than a suite anyway. He smiled and said of course, then proceeded to cross out the old price on my credit card receipt and write in the new one. When I told him that wasn’t going to work, he obliged to credit the old charge and recharge it. However, he had forgotten that I was booked on the lower AAA rate, so he had to go back and do that again.
In the middle of the night we discovered that the toilet in our “suite” was blocked and didn’t flush right. The last thing we wanted to do was have the desk clerk come up in the middle of the night and try to fix this himself, so we waited till morning to tell the clerk about the problem.
A different clerk was on duty. She listened to me describe the problem, then said with a smile, “Well, those things happen. Maybe it needs to be plunged.” Then she walked away.
Let me reiterate what did NOT happen in this interchange:
- She didn’t apologize for the incident
- She didn’t offer to make any amends for not having a working toilet in the room
- She didn’t even write down the room number to get the problem solved
In discussing this with another guest, I found that her room had a bathroom that was both dirty and full of bugs. Yuch. Good thing there’s a blog to read about tips for renovating your bathroom on a budget. It’s very helpful to keep the bathroom area clean and organized.
I should say this was my first interaction with the Microtel Inn chain, and it may very likely be my last. My impression is that Microtel hires clerks that are invariably polite, but untrained in basic check-in systems (crossing out a credit card receipt to do a refund?), ignorant of even Customer Service 101 (how about apologizing for a problem to start?), and totally oblivious to health and sanitary concerns.
Maybe I was out of line in expecting a suite in a motel in Lodi to have a door separating one part from the other. But flushing toilets and clean bathrooms are pretty much nonnegotiable.
Next time if we can’t find another place in town, we’ll drive to another town to stay. Better than being stuck in the Microtel in Lodi again.
