Erik Hayes
1/5
Threatening Manager. Don’t stay here.
I stayed at Super 8 Martinez for three nights starting on June 12, 2024. I read the reviews that didn’t look too bad so I thought that I would give it a chance. Big mistake.
I stayed with my partner and was given non-smoking king room #216. The king bed had a wooden canopy with mirrors in the top. The mirrors were dirty and streaked with handprints. I didn’t complain about it.
On the morning after the first night, I spoke with the front desk to request a different room because my partner and I had both hit our heads on the canopy several times getting in and out of the bed. Also my partner was dealing with insomnia, so I wanted to make sure that any noise from him being awake and walking around super late was not a problem. I was told that we could have a queen room on the ground floor. My partner was still sleeping, so I said I would come back later after he had woken up. When I did, I was told that they had given me incorrect information. The queen room was only available for one night and not the two more nights that we had booked. So it didn’t make sense for us to switch.
Later on when I came back to our existing room, one of the key cards no longer worked. I didn’t deal with it at the time.
Later that same day, I decided to extend our stay by one night because our schedule had changed. I was told that our current room was not available another night, but we could have a different room. I said that would be fine. However, the property couldn’t simply extend our stay. I had to make another reservation online Simple enough. I did so. A little pain to change rooms, but we were only going to shower there and leave for our flight anyway.
Fast forward to the evening when I had to go out to the store and decided to stop by the office to address the room
key which no longer worked. There was no one in the office, so I rang the phone as the sign instructed. The manager arrived, I told him the problem, and then he told me that the office closed at 10 - it was 9:55 - and he gave me trouble making a new key. He wanted me to prove it didn’t work. I said to never mind and went to my car to run to the store. The manager then stopped me in the parking lot as I was leaving and basically threatened not to extend my stay because I was giving him too much trouble. Shocked, I asked to leave to go about my business. Livid at the exchange, I immediately canceled the reservation for the extra night stay.
The next morning, the other room key also stopped working. I went to the office, met the manager, and he gladly re-keyed both cards for me which then worked. Shortly thereafter he called me in the room, apologized for the exchange of the previous evening, and said that it’s difficult to sometimes work 18-20 hours per day running the motel.
The rest of our stay went without incident.
To the manager of this motel - I remind you that you are in the business of hospitality and that sometimes guests have needs which it is your job to accommodate. As someone who is also in the business of travel, my requests were not out of the ordinary, and I was as polite in making them as I could be. If something like this upsets you so much that you feel the need to take the time to stop and threaten the guest, which probably took longer than actually completing the request, perhaps you should be in a different business.
