Date of Visit: April 30-May 1, 2025
Hilton is usually the last place go to find a hotel when I am booking, especially with Mik, as we've had too many bad experiences and find their website the least user friendly. For this quick overnight trip to Columbia for the D23 Member preview of the "Heroes & Villains" exhibit, I did end up going with a Hilton hotel, though, as it was right across the street so we could just walk to the South Carolina State Museum, which overall seemed easier than having to park at museum and drive to hotel after the event. In hindsight, it would have just been easier to not stay in Columbia overnight and drive the 3 hours home.
We arrived at the hotel around 2:45pm and tried to check in to our room at Homewood Suites Columbia Downtown. I had checked in on the app and it said the digital key was still pending, but we decided to still check in because it was almost 3pm check in time and we were hoping to put our stuff in room before going to the museum for the 4pm check in for event to spend the most time seeing the rest of the museum.
Right away trying to check in, it was clear things were not going to go smoothly because she said something like the digital key did not work because the payment did not go through, which is bullshit because it was prepaid back in February and card for incidentals was working just fine. Once I said it was prepaid, she seemed to figure that out and then said she would try to find us a room (seemed more that she meant one ready and not that there was not a room available anymore at this point).
When we still did not have a room at 3:30pm, we were told it was being cleaned and would not be ready before we needed to leave for the museum due to a late check out. They let us each get a snack and beverage from the shop for the inconvenience and we headed to the museum thinking we would have the digital key and head straight to our room when we got back from the museum.
By the time we got back to the hotel around 8:30pm, we still did not have a digital key. We headed to the check in desk and at first the lady treated it like we were just checking in for the first time and was like let me see if I can find you a room. Now I was ready to just get a refund and go home because this was turning into the experience at Tru in Charleston. This time, however, the staff was also annoyed at the situation and the one had just come on shift when we had left earlier and did remember that we supposedly were assigned a room and was trying to figure out why the system now had the room type oversold and none available.
Two staff of the front desk spent the next half hour going through their inventory and going in and actually checking that the rooms were occupied. One also got on the phone with Hilton to figure out what was going on and try to resolve the issue. Eventually they were able to get us an accessible room on the Tru side of the hotel and we took it.
The room we ended up with had 2 queen beds. Mik liked that it did not have carpet.
We had actually booked a suite with only an accessible tub bathroom, but this room had a roll in shower, which is always our preference, but was not necessary for this quick overnight trip.
As usual, the toiletries are not conveniently located with them being on opposite wall from the bench and would have been hard to impossible for someone using bench to actually use. I really like the environmentally friendly idea of the refillable toiletries, but they need to figure out how to make it work for accessibility.
The soap and lotion by the sink were also not that convenient to use, but Mik did at least find this sink style he was able to kneel up and use for his teeth brushing himself.
Mik could not get on the toilet himself, though, because of the toilet paper location probably, but also we were not there long enough to care for him to try to hard and just helped him.
The room was just fine for this particular trip, but it still was annoying to waste so much time and end up being charged a $1.14 for the room on top of what I paid for the Homewood Suites room, which was $16 more than the booking price of the Tru room reservation that was emailed to me when they did the move. They did give us some waters, snacks, and cookies, and the staff really did reasonably quickly resolve it in the end, but Mik was already did not want to go on our summer trip at the end of the month and this experience really made him want to figure out a way to not go until I told him that I did not book any Hilton hotels for it (and he found out eegee's flavor of the month is Orange Dream). I certainly would stay at this hotel again if not with Mik, though, as the staff was friendly and it was overall a nice hotel and good location if we decide to visit the museum again.
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