First let me say that the staff were lovely, but the rest of our experience was awful. My wife had back surgery at the nearby hospital, and we booked a handicapped room for the first two weeks of her recovery. We’ve stayed at Hilton hotels before and generally had good experiences, as have a lot of our friends and family and are even Hilton Honors members. This stay really changed things.
To start with, the room was awful. The keycard reader on the door frequently malfunctioned and required multiple attempts to unlock. Once inside we found much of the room in disrepair. The bathroom door kept sticking open, because it wasn’t on straight and kept catching on the floor. The automatic blinds were broken so that of the four controlled by the unlabeled wall buttons, one didn’t work at all and thus was always down, and the other was reversed so that up meant down and vice versa. Combining this with the fact that the floor lamp was broken, the result was that the room was always too dark.
Also, our room frequently didn’t get cleaned. Even when we were gone most of the day. For example, one day we left at 10:30am and didn’t get back until 4:15pm and found out that the room still hadn’t been done, just like it didn’t get done the day before, and the staff had gone home so it wouldn’t get done until the next day.
Even worse were the fire alarms malfunctions. They went off 5 times while we were there, at one point for three days in a row, always in the early morning, once at 4:30am. All of these were false alarms. Remember, my wife is trying to recover from surgery, so having to wake up early in the morning and evacuate the building puts unneeded stress on her recovery. However, what happened the last time was inexcusable. The elevator stopped functioning. Apparently, they couldn’t get it working again until the false alarm was cleared. Fortunately, we were able to get out before they stopped, but that meant we couldn’t get back to the room until after the alarm was cleared. The room is on the fourth floor. Again, I remind you that my wife just had spine surgery and needed to rest. She couldn’t walk down 4 flights of stairs much less up. Afterward we tried to get a ground floor handicapped room and found out they don’t have any ground floor handicapped rooms. No, not that they were booked, they never bothered to build any. So, forced to choose between a non-handicapped room and the possibility of being trapped in a burning building because the fire alarms disabled the elevators, we switched to a ground floor non-handicapped capped room, which made things much harder. The lack of ground floor handicapped rooms and elevators that disable with fire alarms seem like a genuine safety issue. Apparently, anyone in a wheelchair must have someone to physically carry them or they just die. I am honestly surprised that this situation is legal.
It was a miserable stay, and it was made worse by the indifference of management. When we complained about these situations the staff were very apologetic and did what they could, but they told us the management wouldn’t do anything more than maybe give us some points for a future stay. They didn’t. Since then, any attempts to contact this hotel’s management have gone completely unanswered. And, of course, Hilton’s complaint system just passes any message along to the management that’s ignoring us.
Our experience at the Hilton Garden Inn in Plymouth, Mass. was a very positive one. We stayed for three nights. The room was very nice, and the lobby was well stocked with coffee, tea, and hot chocolate, at all hours. I want to especially thank the night receptionist, John L for the several interactions that we had during our stay. He was attentive to our needs, very personable, and definitely showed that he liked being at the front desk. The next time we are in Plymouth, we will again stay at this hotel.
Mike M, of the lower Hudson Valley.