Terry Prone: A surly receptionist and shirtless clientele, but no sign of my cookie!
Year Been Had By About Owned Hilton A Until Pany Doubletree A By Different Ago,
The guy naked to the waist, a pit bull between his legs, might have been a hint.
First impressions can be misleading.
But when you walk into a large, internationally-branded hotel at 8.30pm, you don’t tend to expect semi-starkers guys in the lobby, drinking in the company of their big threatening dog, surrounded by pals covered in tattoos and singing at the tops of their voices.
The receptionist didn’t seem to notice anything unusual, though. She processed me as if we weren’t surrounded by heavy metal, body art, and threatening canines.
Indeed, it could be said that she processed me as if I were the most boring person in the lobby at that time, which was probably the case.
I handed over a credit card and was handed plastic door-opening cards in return.
The hotel organisation — DoubleTree by Hilton — had emailed me in advance, telling me I didn’t even need to do any of that old-fashioned stuff like going to reception.
If I downloaded a new app, I could go directly to my room and my phone would open the door. Which, you must admit, is a cool technological advance which would save any hotel a lot of hassle.
I couldn’t see it saving a customer any hassle at all, at first arrival, especially if the customer was straight off a transatlantic flight, as I was, and had large suitcases and other bags with them.
In that situation, you don’t just want a receptionist, you want a porter who does the traditional porter things like get your bag in and onto the bag-frame, show you how the air-conditioning works, and get you up to speed with the coffee machine.
But hey, let’s cut the DoubleTree Hilton some slack, here.
Until about a year ago, it had been owned by a different company, and when Hilton took over, they embarked on a re-furb that anybody like me, who had visited in recent years, would have suggested was highly recommended, not to say overdue.
This was a hotel that, if you were minded to be charitable, you would say had seen better days.
It had, in addition, seen some untypical days, because, directly after Hurricane Ian in September 2022, it had been used by the local authority as a central hub for evacuated people seeking assistance, actual holidaymakers being somewhat thin on the ground in the aftermath of Ian.
I was familiar with the hotel because of its location. Close to the airport. Even closer to the local Barnes&Noble.
I’ve often booked in there for a couple of nights, doing shopping, before headed on elsewhere. Simple and unexciting. I had not even visited the Irish pub beside B&N, pubs of any kind not being my thing.
Like what? I obligingly asked.
Like the building blocks, he explained.
They were all imported from Ireland for authenticity.
Bet you didn’t know Irish pubs in the US had to be built of genuine Irish bricks, did you?
Me neither.
Nor do I believe it for a minute, but a great rule of survival is not to contradict a taxi driver convinced of their own truths. They turn into a version of Trump on steroids, ready to die for their unsupported convictions.
This particular driver slowed down as we came near B&N and gestured, to make me appreciate the Irish blocks transported across the Atlantic to make sure the pub was the reconstructed real thing.
Obediently, I looked at where he was pointing. I was familiar with the building from previous years.
This year, however, there was no Irish pub. Not any kind of pub, in fact.
Blank space, overgrown with what used to be called weeds but which have been promoted to wild flowers.
A wildflower meadow, in short, had replaced the Fort Myers Irish pub.
The taxi driver took this in good part.
Did I know, he explained, that the blocks from what was formerly known as Irish Pub would have to be transported back across the Atlantic, now that the Irish Pub was no longer a thing?
I had not known that, I promised him, nodding reverently in the face of a pretty impressive flow of taxi driver bilge.
Maybe it was being in early recovery from taxi driver bilge or maybe it was the half-naked dog-owner that put me off my stroke.
Or maybe it was the re-design of the lobby area into a complete convenience store, selling everything other than sewing machines, as far as I could tell.
But in the process of being processed, so to speak, my wallet went missing.
So there I was, having traversed carpet covered in taped-down plastic, a clear sign of refurb-intent at some unspecified future date.
The taped-down plastic covered carpet I was familiar with, in an appalled way, because its design was a kind of autumnal fever dream, chosen because you could do mass murder in the corridor and the bloodstains would never show.
It was interesting, however, that the patches of carpet concealed by plastic were the same, now, as they had been six months ago.
The project-management didn’t seem to have been energetic.
Then I discovered my wallet had gone walkabout. (Given the experience thus far, you can’t blame it.)
Eventually, I went back down to reception and asked after my wallet.
Oh yeah, the receptionist said uninterestedly, it’s here.
And it was.
Hadn’t struck the receptionist that a quick call to the bedroom of its recently-arrived owner might have been good customer service.
She didn’t even look at me as she handed it over.
Nor did she offer me the free chocolate chip cookie the poster outside the lift promised me.
The dog and his half-naked owner continued to create what you might term ambience.
Next day, the colleague who had booked the room for me emailed DoubleTree to wonder about all of this.
The response was that DoubleTree would hope to get back within three days.
Hope being the thing with feathers which has no role in customer care.
In fairness, those three days were filled with communications from DoubleTree. Most marketing-related. How many points I now had, and what I’d like to tell them about my experience. Already told you, lads. Waiting for a response.
One email swore to me that they took my earlier complaint so seriously, they had brought it to the attention of hotel management.
Hotel management haven’t bothered their arses since.
It would make you fall in love, all over again, with Irish hotels.
Even the worst of them is better than this dud.