My friends and I just returned from a spectacular trip to Iloilo, marred only by the mistake of booking at Park Inn by Radisson Iloilo.
Our troubles began on the very first day. Hot and tired from a day of touring since our arrival at 6:30 in the morning, we entered the hotel to check in around two in the afternoon to find that the lobby air-conditioning didn’t seem to be working.
When a blast of cool air wafted into the lobby from an open function room door, a few of my friends shamelessly stepped inside to get some cool air. Yes, the lobby was that hot and my friends were that desperate that they practically gate-crashed into someone else’s function.
The air-conditioning was working well at the function room but noticeably non-existent at the lobby. But we said nothing. All we wanted to do was get inside our air-conditioned rooms, take a shower, relax and freshen up for dinner.
Stepping into our room, however, we were met with the same lobby temperature. The air-conditioning was set at 23 degrees Celsius. And no cool air was coming out. Have you ever had your aircon unit leak freon and feel like it’s perpetually set on FAN mode? That’s what it felt like.
My friend tried to bring down the temperature but it came right back up to 23. She tried to adjust the fan speed to high to no avail. I told her to wait as it takes some time for the thermostat to adjust to the desired temperature.
We chatted, unpacked, took a shower. But after three calls to the front desk requesting assistance and four hours of waiting, our patience ran out.
We don’t expect perfection but we do expect a certain standard of service from a Radisson hotel. Our calls to the front desk were met with a standard reply: we will send Engineering to your room. Four hours passed. No one came. You can’t say we didn’t patiently wait. Yes, we felt ignored.
Every time we followed up on our request, front desk insisted that the adjustment had already been remotely made but nothing had changed in our room. Yes, we felt gaslighted.
We went down to the lobby, met our friends and learned they had the same problem with one room actually set at 26 degrees Celsius. Like us, they had made several calls for assistance to no avail.
My friend from the 26-degree Celsius room told the front desk to get the problem resolved while we were at dinner and to prepare another room they could transfer to if the problem could not be resolved so they could finally rest after dinner.
After dinner, my friend was informed by the front desk that the problem had been resolved. She happily went up to her room only to find that nothing had changed. Frustrated, she prepared to go down and speak to the Night Manager.
My friend eventually moved to another room where the air-conditioning was finally set to 18 degrees Celsius. As for the rest of our rooms, the temperatures magically moved down to 20 degrees Celsius.
It was only after my friend reached out to hotel staff who had made the bookings and after we sought additional assistance from our tour agency (who did not make the hotel bookings) that the Night Manager appeared, the transfer happened and the temperatures in all the rooms dropped.
Prior to this, our repeated calls to the front desk for assistance and complaints made in person were met with robotic replies and indifference.
The lobby temperature, though, remained the same throughout our stay. When asked about it, front office reply was: we get our power from SM. How this inane reply could be relevant to our question continues to bewilder me.
But that was not the end of our problems.