I mean to post more often than I do, but the necessity of the work to get our house back so we can live in it takes over my sense of the urgent and important, and I end up working longer on tasks related to it, until I use up the time I should be blogging.
For blogging I think I need to do, more frequently.
Today’s events make me question whether they show I need to blog more often, or cut it out. But that is the subject of another post, if I make that post at all. For today, I review the place we have been staying at for the past 10 weeks, and having started our 11th week.
We were staying at the Extended Stay America – Airport, Tiffany Springs. Which delineates it from the Extended Stay America that is actually closer to the KCI Airport. We had found the place a good place to stay, comfortable, suitable for the three of us, and somewhat convenient for being able to get our son to work in Grandview, while enabling us to work on restoring our house near North Kansas City.
They have a grab-and-go breakfast which sometimes is almost nothing, and when it is something, is packets of oatmeal, breakfast bars and muffins, along with coffee and hot water for tea, and occasionally hot cocoa. But the staff has been pleasant and helpful, and we have made many compliments to them about our service, even to the person who unceremoniously threw us out today for “multiple disturbances” that we had heard nothing about.
The hotel has been going through renovations starting Dec. 11 and to be completed by Jan. 31. We weren’t bothered by the paint smells, the concrete cracked floors revealed when they tore up the hallway carpets, or other inconveniences. But when we went to leave our room this morning to go to church, we found construction workers putting down the glue to put down the new carpet, and were told that we had to stay prisoners in our room for the next 10 minutes until they got done.
Well, If they were going to barricade us into our rooms, they should have told us beforehand, so we could have left if necessary. I said they had no right to do so without notifying us beforehand, and walked across the glue to get out so we could go to church.
Whether that is why they told our son, who had stayed behind, that we were being kicked out, I do not know, since that hardly counts as multiple disturbances. They at first gave us until 1 p.m. to clear out, and eventually gave us until 3 p.m. to clear out.
When I got back I went down to the desk to ask what the multiple disturbances were. I also intended to ask them to show me the permit for their elevators, which I had intended to do previously. But all I had to do was wait at the end of the line of people at the desk (only one customer in front of me), for the clerk to tell me that I had better calm down and leave or she was going to call the police on me.
Since I had done nothing but stand there, quietly, calmly, with no motions of any kind, this was obviously some sort of discrimination being made against me, though I could not figure out why I was being discriminated against. My statement of “I am calm” made the clerk reach for the phone after saying something like “that’s it”, and presumably starting to call the police.
To avoid having my entire family thrown out without a chance of retrieving our stuff, I removed myself from the property, and was thus unable to help them get our stuff packed or moved out.
They picked me up to drive the first load of stuff back to our house, where we staged things until we could find another place to stay, and when I returned the car to the hotel, I did reenter this time and help pack the rest of the items. I passed several staff during this time, and exchanged pleasant words with them, and was greeted with kind and pleasant exchanges, indicating they saw me as no threat and were perhaps even unaware of how we were being unceremoniously kicked out.
I hate to write this post and review at all for their sake, because I found almost everyone there at the hotel people I genuinely respected and appreciated for the services they provided. But I cannot in good conscience recommend this place as a place to stay as long as someone is able to cast you out for things you are said to have done, and not allowed to even talk to them without it being seen as a threatening gesture. And if it was “multiple disturbances”, did they all happen to occur at once so that we were given no notice of the problem, nor asked to correct our unrecognized disturbing of whoever it was that was disturbed by them?
Yes, a place of business is allowed to choose whom they want to serve, but if they give a pretext for an action, one should be able to ask for more than what we were provided. Especially since we had been there 10 weeks without a peep out of them that anything was the problem. They had no problem taking my son’s payment on Friday for our 11th week (our weeks were Friday night to Thursday night), then suddenly threw us out two nights later for “multiple disturbances”
After all that, I would expect that out of courtesy they might have informed us of what we were doing that suddenly was seen as a disturbance when it hadn’t been for the past 10 weeks?
We were told that if they inspected the room and found no damages that they would refund to my son the money for the days we had not used. And they are almost certain to find the damage to the one item they we had repeatedly asked for them to repair, and which they had repaired once, only to have it fall apart within two days. And which they never repaired since, though we mentioned it to them weekly.
So if they choose that to withhold my son’s money from him, then they are being both dishonest and unscrupulous. We don’t know the answer to that question yet, but I attest that we left the room in as good a shape as we received it, with the exceptions of the used linens, which were piled in the tub or on the bed, as best applied. And we even swept the room thoroughly. Twice.
So if you are in a compromised position, I do not recommend this place, as we were so compromised, and were taken advantage of, for no reason that I can determine. If I could determine a reason I wouldn’t be so uneasy. But that people (actually, one person, from what I can determine) would choose to use you and abuse you for no reason that they are willing to back up (an accusation with no details), makes my skin crawl.
And I hope their chain and their management look into this thoroughly and get back to us. If we did something, why would they not tell us precisely what we were supposed to have done? Even if they were justified, we have no reason to believe they were, and their action looks, if it isn’t actually, suspicious and discriminatory.
At The Rainbow 