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September 30, 2005

Lack of Posting{Again}

The past week, I've been staying at the Doubletree Suites Times Square in New York, where just because they say they feature high speed Internet doesn't make it altogether so.

To be fair, they do have wired Internet, as most large hotels through an outside firm. Theirs, however, was a complete nightmare -- nearly everything I tried to do encountered "Cannot find page," or "Page unavailable," even such mundane tasks as deleting an email, commenting at another blog, opening an email, replying to an email or accessing my gmail.

I attempted to post several times and the posts were lost as soon as I tried to publish them.

I finally reached the boiling point and got things moving here between the outside company's tech support and the hotel's engineering department, and it turned out that there was some intense technical problem in the hotel's server that involved bandwidth and some other factors well above my own IT knowledge base.

They seem to have done something, what I don't know, that makes the system here work better, though not enough so to throw a major party over, as much as I'd like to just for partying's sake. There are still significant problems.

But then, for those of you who are planning to come to New York and are looking for a hotel, I can't say I'd recommend Doubletree Suites. This is my second time dealing with this chain, the first being about two and a half weeks ago when I attended a conference in Orlando and upon arriving at a Doubletree there, found that they'd screwed up my reservation -- this time was different. They had the accommodation I'd requested, but...

Unlike in other large hotels I've stayed at, these folks have too many employees who don't speak sufficient English in positions where they should, given the fact that this is the U.S. of A., where English is coin-of-the-realm. On too many occasions, orders I put in or things I requested were interpreted quite differently than what I had asked for.

Earlier today, I received a call from the front desk telling me the debit card I'm using here had been declined and they needed a second form of payment. This was impossible, trust me, and I called my bank and was reassured that they had not declined anything. So I called the desk back and had a short conversation with them, and it turned out that they had screwed up by trying to use an approval code a second time, and that never works. The desk manager straightened that out in a hurry.

There were a few other screwups I won't bother getting into.

One of my other gripes has been the fact that for a shameless $2.50 per cup, they serve some cheap, cardboardy canned coffee that prompted me to go out and buy a pound of Starbucks for use in the in-room coffee maker. At $379.00 a night, you'd think they could at least spring for some decent coffee, but these folks are too cheap and greedy for that. I've had better coffee than theirs at greasy spoons in poor, sleazy neighborhoods.

The employees in this hotel are friendly and outgoing and attempt to be as helpful as you could want, but the organization here is a complete goatfuck and they can only work with what they have.

To their credit, they did back out the charges for the lame Internet access, which comes out to $10.00 a day.

For all I know, this post may not make it to the Web. If it does, great.

In short, this is the last time I will ever stay at a Doubletree and I'll most definitely tell friends about the mistake it would be if they did.

Tomorrow, I'll be heading up to Boston for three days, to a great hotel that promises first class Wi-Fi.

I will continue posting from there.

Posted by Seth at September 30, 2005 05:48 PM

Comments

Posted by: Michael at October 2, 2005 08:19 PM

Posted by: Seth at October 2, 2005 08:44 PM