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We are chain with 9 or so hotels sprinkled over Australia and one over seas locations. We all act pretty independently though.
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Apr 12, 2015 09:32
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Why don't the hotels just advertise the same prices as the 3rd party bookings on the website? I can see walk-ins and phone perhaps being a big higher, but anyone looking online will probably be comparing the prices to the 3rd party. I always just book at the cheapest site and haven't been burned yet, these days I almost don't even bother looking at the official website because there's usually a pretty significant difference. Most people won't call to haggle so why not just have a competitive price?
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Apr 12, 2015 10:44
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My guess is that the third party sites get a discount that they've negotiated since they likely book thousands of rooms a year with any given hotel. If the hotels lower their room rates to be competitive with the third parties, then all they've done is either increased the margins for the third parties or made the third party prices cheaper. Those lower prices are going to still be subject to the discount the online bookers get after all. So long as any hotels in the area are using those sites, a hotel can't afford to lose the business. The only way to stop them would be for all hotels to stop giving a discount to the online bookers and agree to collectively lower their prices. This is unlikely to happen.
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Apr 12, 2015 11:59
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Murphy Brownback posted:I've had enough terrible experiences booking airline tickets through priceline (I was forced to since I have to book the lowest available rate for work trips) to ever consider it for hotels. Those ones where you just pick like "4 star hotel" without telling you which hotel until after you pay (hotwire I think?) seem like you're begging for a bad experience too. It is *possible* to get the boiler-room hotel room, i.e. the room in a 20-story hotel that is on the first floor and faces the parking lot, but at the end of the day it is the exact same room as you'd find on the 20th floor, with the same amenities, the same location, the same service, etc. But instead of paying $200/night, you're paying $100. Gut feel, I'd say I get the boiler-room hotel room about 10% of the time, a run-of-house room about 80% of the time, and an upgrade about 10% of the time. In my experience, you deal with the hotel staff for about 2 minutes upon check in, and the class of hotel room you get is based exclusively on how that conversation goes. Imagine you are a desk agent checking in 80 rooms a day, you know that you're going to have to upgrade 5 people and walk 5 people and check 70 in to the room they are booked for. Other things being equal, who would you upgrade - the guy who paid the highest direct book rate, or the guy who chatted you up at the front desk, and told you how much he was looking forward to spending a few days in your town, then asked what your favorite restaurant was? Hint: It's the friendly guy.
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Apr 12, 2015 18:59
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The thing that puts me off of priceline is the whole "bidding" thing. It makes no sense to me. I use booking.com and I know either I can or can't afford a hotel. A lot of times I am traveling for work, so proximity to the conference center is often the #1 priority. I don't care if I can save 50% by staying 5 miles away, i'd rather pay 50% more and be within walking distance.
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Apr 12, 2015 19:29
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Based on this conversation, I made a direct booking with one hotel on my upcoming vacation, and two through hotels.com (which I did prior to this discussion). Now... we'll see who's right. The direct booking didn't cost more, either -- I checked. EDIT: The hotel lists "selfie stick" as a provided amenity. We're all going to hell. PT6A fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Apr 12, 2015 |
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Apr 12, 2015 20:14
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Just so you guys know not all hotels will have cheaper prices with online travel agents. I don't know if this is a regional thing but It is ALWAYS cheaper to book direct at our hotels and our site always offers the same deals any OTA. There might be some once in a blue moon thing (happened once in my 2 years at this hotel) promotion that we only run on a certain website but you can be guaranteed we will match it direct. It doesn't make sense to us to offer a 40%off deal on to OTA and then have to pay a commission on top of that but not offer the same deal to direct guests who we don't lose a commission to.
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Apr 12, 2015 23:11
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As far as staying in hotels I've been lucky most of the time. Once though I was showed a room by the owner of a small hotel in Greece who casually mentioned that I could smoke inside because "you can smoke at least 15 cigarettes before that thing goes off" - pointing at the smoke detector. Another one in Spain, Mallorca - I was lounging on the balcony reading a book when the door to my room suddenly opened and in comes a man who was very startled to find me there. He stammers out "Here to fix heating" before bolting. Finding this weird I inform reception and upon my return I notice all doors had a bit of wood chipped away from the door frame, next to the lock. All doors on the floor and I must assume the hotel. Chipped away so that you could use a credit card or piece of metal or whatever to just unlock the door, no key needed. I happen to work in hotels too, F&B department. Luckily I never encountered murder scenes or huge dildos. First gig was a 5 star, grand old place, marble everywhere, chandeliers, paintings, the works. It used to belong to a very well-known chain with about 75 Five star hotels. Problem is, the place didn't get all of the wealthy customers needed to operate such such a luxurious hotel and was soon sold to another group, local, who specialized in real estate. Now this real estate group owned 3 four stars already and their MO was "cutting corners". A wing was renovated by their own construction company which worked with unschooled immigrants who they could pay less then other people, as a result a ton of rooms had a nice distinct odour of sewage. Imagine that in your 5star luxury suite. A ton of marketing material was purchased, flyers and info leaflets and the like, featuring the hotels indoor swimming pool - which got concreted over to put a gym there. Different flyers you say? Do you know how much that costs? Just keep using these old ones until they are gone! The amount of people with big towels over their shoulders and swimming gear on I had to give the bad news..  Security measures! After a theft or something, they installed key card readers in all elevators so you couldn't operate the elevator without your room key. How this worked is it just disabled all buttons. Door open button? Disabled. Panic button? Hah! Disabled. You could of course still summon and open the lifts from out in the hall. I'm sure you can imagine what happened to people who only had one card per room/kids and room servicing F&B staff who had to share the one duty key. Staff! Almost all the staff there over 6 months were from the old chain. The new owners refused to give contracts to most people, instead hiring people, firing them when their 6 month probation was almost up, which was cheaper for some red tape reason. This happened to me and after recently speaking to a friend doing reception there, there are only 2 F&B from after the takeover I know left, both on 5 months.  Some 'veterans' got the gently caress out of dodge too when they could, of course. This led to hilarious moments like the time the Owners came to the bar to have a glass of champagne or whatever. Seconds of them arriving, Operations manager, sales and GM arrived panting, ordered all staff out on their breaks ( i had started only an hour before, they didn't trust the staff for some reason, I had years and years of bar/restaurant experience myself and the one other wait-staff even more ) - and proceed to pander over them, completely ignoring the rest of the semi full bar and terrace. When I got off break i found the bar a mess, till completely messed up with people that paid the wrong bill, somebody who was still waiting for a glass of wine half an hour later... We also had 'stagaires' which is an internship - these are people who go to school to become hotel manager or something, and do an internship in a hotel for experience. Now these people didn't receive wages because it was school. Or a pittance, anyway, they were hella cheap. So of course these people had to work 12+ hour shifts. Speaking of this girl. One day all senior staff had to go to a staff party so poor me was left DM of the place. This was ok, mostly quiet, place runs itself. So I put this girl behind the bar, ( Where she had worked for at least a couple of months, keep also in mind they go to school to learn about this sort of thing - AND there is a fully functioning PC at the bar with internet/google access) - as i was briefly needed elsewhere. I was not gone 5 minutes when my dutyphone goes off and i pick up to hear her shouting "Cwmagain! come tot the bar quickly!" - Off I run, half expect the bar to be in flames. I enter, ask whats up and she says: "What is a baileys...?"  We also were promised a meal every day, seeing as we worked during lunch or breakfast or dinner or whatever. ( Promised, well, legally required ) This meal however consisted every day of the breakfast leftovers. Which got picked clean by breakfast staff/housekeeping so in the end we at ham and cheese toasties every day for half a year, bar the few days there was an actual meal ( leftovers from another event ). I worked all the time in a shirt 4 sizes too small because money. One time also, the massage therapist ran home freaked out, because a guest started jacking off on her, but that's less cheap owners and more creepy pervs. Still, learned a lot in that place. 
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Apr 12, 2015 23:17
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Murphy Brownback posted:The thing that puts me off of priceline is the whole "bidding" thing. It makes no sense to me. I use booking.com and I know either I can or can't afford a hotel. A lot of times I am traveling for work, so proximity to the conference center is often the #1 priority. I don't care if I can save 50% by staying 5 miles away, i'd rather pay 50% more and be within walking distance.
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Apr 13, 2015 00:45
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photomikey posted:In my experience, you deal with the hotel staff for about 2 minutes upon check in, and the class of hotel room you get is based exclusively on how that conversation goes. Imagine you are a desk agent checking in 80 rooms a day, you know that you're going to have to upgrade 5 people and walk 5 people and check 70 in to the room they are booked for. Other things being equal, who would you upgrade - the guy who paid the highest direct book rate, or the guy who chatted you up at the front desk, and told you how much he was looking forward to spending a few days in your town, then asked what your favorite restaurant was? Hint: It's the friendly guy. "Balancing" rooms is usually done the day before or earlier on the same day - if you're still -1 in any room types at check in time, someone didn't do their job or there was a same say booking. You might get an upgrade for being friendly, sure, but it generally goes 1) loyalty club member 2) long stays 3) special occasions 4) direct bookings/higher rate 5) oh poo poo we're -5 in NK1s tomorrow, just upgrade whoever. Hotels will typically oversell their basic rooms to get volume, then upgrade guests as needed. We're not upgrading you because we like you, we just have to make the numbers work. Horatius Bonar fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Apr 13, 2015 |
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Apr 13, 2015 09:00
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Horatius Bonar posted:2) long stays This is the exact opposite of my experience. We almost never give away free upgrades to long stays unless they're high value rewards people or VIPs of some flavor. The idea is that a complimentary upgrade is worth $X per day, and we'd rather give away 1X than 12X. Single-night stays are much more likely to get the upgrade.
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Apr 13, 2015 09:38
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CaptainJuan posted:This is the exact opposite of my experience. We almost never give away free upgrades to long stays unless they're high value rewards people or VIPs of some flavor. The idea is that a complimentary upgrade is worth $X per day, and we'd rather give away 1X than 12X. Single-night stays are much more likely to get the upgrade. Yeah, we don't upgrade them more than we have to, it's just that they usually book a poo poo room so we move them up to a mediocre room so they don't come down and complain that the room is too small or whatever. Avoiding situations like that is worth 12X to me as an employee and to my hotel as well. I'd say long stays (more than a week) are about 0.01% of guests that book at my hotels anyways. Horatius Bonar fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Apr 13, 2015 |
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Apr 13, 2015 09:43
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It was August of '98 and we went to Cleveland for a Bauhaus concert. We had this whole zen notion (that had worked for us in the past) that we would show up early to the event location and then back-track to a hotel in the area. Little did we know that Nautica Stage was located roughly in the middle of a10 mile wide irradiated crater. We figure this isn't a problem, we'll just hop on this main road here and drive a little bit. Nothing. In fact we now appear to be in an older residential area of the city, no chance of a hotel here right? Wrong! I spy a "Hotel" sign in front of what looks like a converted mansion. Cool! A mansion that's been converted into a hotel? No! a mansion that's been converted into a flop house! We sit in our car for a moment and look around, none of the cars look 'to nice' or 'to awful' so we figure wtf lets give it a try. The front office looks like they took out the back wall of the front hall closet and then put a desk and shatterproof glass over the doorway to seal off the clerk from the "guests". He tells us the room is some super cheap price ( I forget, it's been a while, but probably 60 bux) we ask to see it, so he shows us up and we decide to take it. The room has a bed, a tv attached to the ceiling and a simple bath. it looks old, dingy and not overly clean. We feel a little bummed out at this point, but we don't want to keep driving around as it's getting close to concert time and we need food and booze. Turns out that just down the cross street from the hotel are a bunch of restaurants and a liquor store. We get Chinese take out and a fifth of vodka and return to the room. We start to notice we aren't alone in our room. lots of little bugs. Thankfully the vodka is working like a charm and we cheer our new roommates. When we leave for the concert we remember to bear-bag our leftovers by hanging it from the T.V. ceiling mount. When we get to the concert we catch up to our friends and have a fantastic time. Afterwards we all decide to go to this punk/goth club we'd heard about, but it's early still so we figure we all have time to go back to our respective hotels to freshen up. They say they got a place just outside the city limits, but since it's early they should have plenty of time. Getting out of the concert it was of course bumper-to-bumper, but in no time at all we get back to our flop. Turns out it's in a magical area where traffic flow is always light coming from the entertainment district as it doesn't connect to any of the major highways. And even though it felt like forever finding it, it's actually about 5 mins from the venue. The room isn't looking any better, but by now we are totally stoked about our crazy room. My husband decides he wants a shower, so he lets the hot water run for five minutes to scald/shoo the bugs out of it. The bugs seem pretty polite and stayed off the bed, but we decide we should probably sleep fully clothed on top of the blankets anyway. Then the hotel becomes magical. Turns out the club we want to go to is just around the corner by the Chinese place we got dinner! We have a blast but don't see our friends again. Turns out they got stuck in gridlock from the concert and spent three hours just trying to get to their hotel. To top it all off? When we got back in the wee hours of the morning, we got to watch Return of the Living Dead II while eating our bear-bagged Chinese leftovers and swigging vodka. Magical. I mean sure, we propped a door under the door handle, slept in our cloths and shoes, and slept as lightly as the vodka would allow..but Magical. Several months later some friends were gonna go see a show in Cleveland and wanted suggestions on a place to stay. We warned them about everything, stressed that it was a flop house, but that it was close to the venue and to a good club. They stayed in it and they got the room with the bloody hand print. To this day they seem conflicted about whether that was a problem or a bonus.
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Apr 14, 2015 16:38
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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang posted:but we decide we should probably sleep fully clothed on top of the blankets anyway. However. Great story, and well told.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:59
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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang posted:we propped a door under the door handle Holy poo poo, I've heard of putting a chair under there, but this seems a little excessive. 
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Apr 15, 2015 03:05
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I used to work housekeeping. Worst day ever: the day a busload of Korean tourists laughed at me as I was covered in garbage and crying. Most other days are tied for second.
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Apr 15, 2015 08:27
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Bomrek posted:I used to work housekeeping. Housekeeping has consistently the worst job in the hotel. Followed by Janitor, Breakfast person/s, and Front Desk - in that order.
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Apr 15, 2015 09:08
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photomikey posted:The blankets are 10x more disgusting than the sheets. Without exception. You know, I think we had a discussion to that effect and I think we considered at least flipping the blanket over. I'm pretty sure we compromised by pulling it half down and folding it over. I think that's how we discovered the sheets were gray. Captain Bravo posted:Holy poo poo, I've heard of putting a chair under there, but this seems a little excessive. Oops 
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Apr 15, 2015 12:49
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I had a hotel experience that was more puzzling than disgusting or unpleasant. My wife and I spent a week in Paris and for our last night there, we stayed at a chain hotel by the airport so it would be easy to catch our flight home early the next morning. The room was decent and clean, dildo free, nothing fancy. The odd thing was the bathroom. It was just a large tile room with a drain in the corner and a shower head. No curtain, no stall, nothing separating the shower from where the sink was, nothing to prevent the towels and toilet paper or anything you brought into the bathroom with you from getting soaked. When we were done with our showers of course the floor was one giant puddle for the rest of our stay. You had to go in there with shoes on. I cannot imagine why they would design a bathroom that way. It was like a de-lousing room in a mental hospital or something. Ralph Hurley fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Apr 15, 2015 |
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Apr 15, 2015 21:48
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Ralph Hurley posted:The room was decent and clean, dildo free, nothing fancy. Please leave this as a review on Yelp or equivalent review site for the hotel. quote:The odd thing was the bathroom. It was just a large tile room with a drain in the corner and a shower head... When I stayed in Beijing (in an apartment, not a hotel), the bathroom was the same. Just a small tiled room with a drain in the centre of the floor and a shower head / hose thing on the wall. There was a toilet in the corner and a basin and everything and when I showered I'd just stand over the drain and try not to soak the whole room. I guess it's a thing for whatever reason?
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Apr 16, 2015 01:19
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Ralph Hurley posted:I had a hotel experience that was more puzzling than disgusting or unpleasant. My wife and I spent a week in Paris and for our last night there, we stayed at a chain hotel by the airport so it would be easy to catch our flight home early the next morning. Probably for handicap accessibility. I've seen similar things when I've been put in an "accessible room" at a hotel.
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Apr 16, 2015 01:28
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Ralph Hurley posted:I had a hotel experience that was more puzzling than disgusting or unpleasant. My wife and I spent a week in Paris and for our last night there, we stayed at a chain hotel by the airport so it would be easy to catch our flight home early the next morning. This is literally every bathroom in Asia. A lot of cultures don't actually shower the way Americans/Westerners do. They take the shower head off the wall and hose themselves directly or they fill a bucket and scoop water. Wearing shoes in the bathroom is a 100% normal thing to do in a lot of Asia because of the wet floors. Why your bathroom in France was like this, I haven't the foggiest.
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Apr 16, 2015 04:09
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Cwmagain posted:The new owners refused to give contracts to most people, instead hiring people, firing them when their 6 month probation was almost up, which was cheaper for some red tape reason. In my experience this is generally because you don't get benefits until after your probationary period is over.
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Apr 16, 2015 04:57
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I spent a month in China for work last year and two of the four hotels I stayed in had bathroom-stall size areas with a Western toilet directly underneath the shower head. The third was a standard Western bathroom, and the fourth was some kind of poo palace--it had a Western toilet, a bidet, and a squat toilet, all in a row with two shower heads on the opposite wall.
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Apr 16, 2015 05:08
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The whole-bathroom-as-shower thing is something I've seen in Cuba as well, along with the ever popular options of "there is no shower, only bath!" and the shower-without-a-door, so you get water all over the goddamn place anyway.
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Apr 16, 2015 05:18
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Not the worst experience I've had but the person working the night desk last night wouldn't check us in until after we listened to his rather long libertarian\fascist screed about the pernicious influence of Jew on Europeans politics and how tthe only reason people like Obama is because of white guilt. In glad we checked in using my wife's name.
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Apr 16, 2015 08:49
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Ralph Hurley posted:I had a hotel experience that was more puzzling than disgusting or unpleasant. My wife and I spent a week in Paris and for our last night there, we stayed at a chain hotel by the airport so it would be easy to catch our flight home early the next morning. They have a shower similar to that in the Radisson Blu hotel in the Zurich airport. No door or barrier of any kind from the rest of the bathroom, and on top of that there's a semi-transparent window between the shower wall and the rest of the room. It doesn't matter if you're alone I guess, but one of the top complaints on the review sites is about that window and the showers getting water everywhere (and the 300-400+ a night price tag). If you want a privacy curtain you have to call down and have housekeeping come put one up. I guess they were trying to be modern and fancy, but I would much rather have a good old-fashioned shower. The only nice thing about the bathrooms is they have speakers so you can still hear the TV while you're in there.
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Apr 16, 2015 10:47
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On my honeymoon we got the wrong key from the hotel reception guy so we stepped into an already occupied room in the middle of the night. The lady inside was not amused to say the least. After hearing us enter the room she jumped out of her bed yelling.
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Apr 16, 2015 15:50
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Klaaz posted:On my honeymoon we got the wrong key from the hotel reception guy so we stepped into an already occupied room in the middle of the night. The lady inside was not amused to say the least. After hearing us enter the room she jumped out of her bed yelling. Yeah, my first night working at a hotel I walked in on some dude sleeping and woke him up. Woops! Also at another hotel I worked one of my colleagues accidentally programmed a key for the wrong room. A female guest walked in on one of her male workmates naked. This was the #1 rated hotel in Sydney on Tripadvisor at the time and that woman got about $2000 worth of free accom.
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Apr 16, 2015 16:15
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I needed a room for the night in San Francisco and was super broke so I ended up at a Tenderloin hotel. The lobby was set up like some kind of weird high security jail, with a metal cage that you had to go into and then ask over an old intercom to be buzzed in. It was like a week after Christmas and there was a poo poo ton of obnoxious cheap flashing light decorations and ratty tinsel and stuff all over the cage. This old guy who barely spoke english and was only wearing his pjs pants and a dirty wifebeater demanded $40 for a room, so I slipped him the money through the bars in exchange for a key. I get through the security door to see the dirtiest hotel I've ever seen. The walls were dingy and stained really badly, what was left of the carpet was frayed and black with dirt and grime, and there were huge rats and cockroaches everywhere and trash all over the ground. I didn't even go to my room, I turned around and asked the guy for a refund because there was no loving way I was staying there. He immediately started yelling at me and telling me "NO REFUNDS" over and over. So I tore down a bunch of his lovely Christmas decorations and took off running down the street with handfuls of tinsel and mini light strands. I ended up trading the room key for some hash to some travelers from Humboldt, and slept in my car instead.
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Apr 16, 2015 20:14
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There's a really seedy extended-stay hotel near my work that gets regular visits from the police and fire department. A couple years ago one of those visits was to arrest a prostitute who had bit off her client's penis.
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Apr 19, 2015 07:48
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When I was a public defender, I'd represent a lot of prostitutes. Most of them were are fairly high end hotels for the area.
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Apr 19, 2015 21:36
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Ralph Hurley posted:I had a hotel experience that was more puzzling than disgusting or unpleasant. My wife and I spent a week in Paris and for our last night there, we stayed at a chain hotel by the airport so it would be easy to catch our flight home early the next morning. In the UK they are called "wet rooms". Had one in a house I rented for a few years - if the floor is installed correctly it should be at a very slight angle leading to the drain so you don't have giant puddles everywhere. But unless you have a massive one, you have to keep towels and toilet paper in a cupboard or something. I have only ever had one bad hotel experience, while staying away for work. I had just stepped out of a nice, long, hot bath, and was taking a towel off the rack. I unfolded it, and a single pube drifted out like a leaf in the wind. Thankfully it fell out first before I used the towel to dry my face.
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Apr 21, 2015 14:24
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Whipstickagostop posted:In the UK they are called "wet rooms". Had one in a house I rented for a few years - if the floor is installed correctly it should be at a very slight angle leading to the drain so you don't have giant puddles everywhere. But unless you have a massive one, you have to keep towels and toilet paper in a cupboard or something. poo poo, if that's your worst hotel experience, you are a lucky fucker (or you've stayed in exactly two hotels). In terms of lovely hotel stories, my mom just found out she picked up some kind of mite or parasite from (we think) the hotel she stayed at in Fiji. A five-star, no less. I think that ought to count.
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Apr 21, 2015 16:53
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PT6A posted:poo poo, if that's your worst hotel experience, you are a lucky fucker (or you've stayed in exactly two hotels). Bed bugs are a big deal for hotels that want to have a decent reputation. At my old hotel we had a contract with an airline for x number of rooms per night. We got a complaint from one of the stewards that we had bed bugs. We got pest control in and we certainly didnt have bed bugs but this steward was telling people on flights to our city that we did and not to stay with us! She either got fired or transferred when my boss got a solicitor to send the airline a letter.
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Apr 21, 2015 19:48
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Big Willy Style posted:Bed bugs are a big deal for hotels that want to have a decent reputation. At my old hotel we had a contract with an airline for x number of rooms per night. We got a complaint from one of the stewards that we had bed bugs. We got pest control in and we certainly didnt have bed bugs but this steward was telling people on flights to our city that we did and not to stay with us! She either got fired or transferred when my boss got a solicitor to send the airline a letter. It wasn't bed bugs, it was something that burrows under your skin and makes you itch terribly or something. She's been to the doctor and had the treatment, but apparently even so, the itching will last for another 4-6 weeks. According to my folks, Fiji isn't so much a "tropical paradise" as it is a "hot, humid, third-world shithole located in a picturesque setting."
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Apr 21, 2015 19:54
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PT6A posted:It wasn't bed bugs, it was something that burrows under your skin and makes you itch terribly or something. She's been to the doctor and had the treatment, but apparently even so, the itching will last for another 4-6 weeks. Scabies? By the way everyone don't read about scabies unless you want to be really itchy all of a sudden.
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Apr 21, 2015 21:55
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Hummingbirds posted:Scabies? Yeah, I think that was it.
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Apr 21, 2015 22:29
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candywife posted:I needed a room for the night in San Francisco and was super broke so I ended up at a Tenderloin hotel. You stayed in an SRO (single room occupancy hotel), not a normal tourist hotel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy They charge weekly and monthly....some probably by the hour too? SF has one of the highest numbers of SROs in the country, and the vast majority are in the Tenderloin. They're one of the last bastions of the poor in SF (along with public housing, rent controlled units, cardboard boxes and vehicles, and people splitting rent by stuffing two families in one apartment or whatever). Most of them would have been completely renovated or torn down, and converted to upscale apartments or tourist hotels, but due to the efforts of anti-gentrification and historic preservation activists in the 1970 and 1980s, that was stopped before it could really take off. That basically kept the Tenderloin from gentrifying heavily and becoming an extension of the neighboring union square tourist/shopping district, despite the fact that some of the most expensive real estate in the nation is right next door. It also helped poverty in the tenderloin grow and became even more entrenched (as did the city dumping tons of social services there, and prisons dropping off parolees and released convicts there). So you have a weird situation where a giant, nice tourist hotel like the Hilton (on the border of union square and the tenderloin), has poo poo-tastic residential hotels across the street, and people smoking crack, and getting shot and robbed right out front. There are so many lost and confused tourists around there. Many SROs and apartment buildings in the tenderloin are owned by slumlords and are in really bad shape, with vermin (rats, bedbugs, roaches, etc), garbage and broken poo poo all over, etc. I remember one incident that made the news where a building's elevator had been broken for like three months, trapping disabled residents inside while the building owner/manager ignored it. I remember reading about another management company hiring tough guys to intimidate and rough residents up in order to scare them away and avoid having to evict them. The neighborhood, being poor and centrally located, is also a hot spot for drug dealers, prostitutes, and of course drug addicts. Guess who often ends up in the SROs? Sometimes entire buildings basically get overrun with drug dealers. And I mentioned social services, which includes tons of stuff for the homeless, so lots of homeless people hang out in the TL too. So when it comes to an SRO in SF, you have normal poor people from all over living in them (mostly from the US, Latin America, and Asia), but also a sizable number of crazy and/or drug addicted people, and shady drug dealers and hustlers and poo poo. And a sprinkling of tourists enticed by the low prices, who don't mind grit, grime and crazed meth fiends, or who were tricked into renting a room by assuming that proximity to union square means "nice", or by misleading ads for a cheap hotel in "union square", when it's actually in the tenderloin. And most of them are run by people on some level of the "don't give a poo poo" spectrum. I've been in two SROs in SF. One in the tenderloin, and one in the mission district. Both were dingy, dirty, had crooked-looking floors/walls here and there (they are century-old buildings that have survived earthquakes and seen minimal maintenance, afterall), all kinds of mystery stains on all kinds of surfaces, graffiti inside the building, front desk dudes who were equal parts suspicious/bored, and shady people hanging around. They were also overpriced for their lovely-ness (as is usual in SF). The elevator in the Tenderloin one was an original from 1920 or something, was covered in graffiti, barely held four people, and only had a rusty sliding metal gate for a door. We put three people in it in an attempt to get to the roof, but it couldn't handle the weight, and went upwards about 2 inches in 30 seconds  . We got off on the same floor we started on, and only used the stairs after that.SRO examples, maybe including the very hotel you stayed at: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.784129,-122.414373,3a,75y,283.85h,97.22t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1smDWfr1ekwoSrojmYhmA1CQ!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.783013,-122.414147,3a,75y,256.79h,98.19t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sHfbR3f8yZ5gC-kRz2tyBew!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.783762,-122.414082,3a,75y,162.14h,87.92t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sUP2zu6IyisnjDJpNPz-Odg!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.784803,-122.413456,3a,75y,151.27h,93.84t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s4TFbgzKqCWGnS7rZGH-LfQ!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.784443,-122.412721,3a,75y,78.6h,105t/data=!3m5!1e1!3m3!1sIyXHjsuZqu525OaIznts7Q!2e0!5s20131101T000000 As for actual tourist hotels? I guess I'm lucky, because the worst I've experienced is a room that hadn't been cleaned by housekeeping yet. So they gave us a different room that was fine. There was also the time that the room was obviously a converted closet, and was wedged next to the elevators...but it had beds and a bathroom, and it was clean and everything, so who cares. Rah! fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 23:40
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Rah! posted:a building's elevator had been broken for like three months, trapping disabled residents inside while the building owner/manager ignored it. I remember reading about another management company hiring tough guys to intimidate and rough residents up in order to scare them away and avoid having to evict them. The neighborhood, being poor and centrally located, is also a hot spot for drug dealers, prostitutes, and of course drug addicts. Guess who often ends up in the SROs?
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Apr 24, 2015 04:43
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