Days Inn - Don't Call Us. We'll Call You (NOT!)

We drove an extra hour to the Days Inn at Cleveland, MS, because it advertised gym/exercise facilities. After several days of relative inactivity due to visiting friends and long hours of car travel, we were looking forward to a bit of a workout. After checking in, I inquired about the gym and was told that it was out of order! Imagine our disappointment. Actually, we felt more than disappointed. We felt cheated!

Wanting to make sure that we had not been mistaken, we checked the website once more and saw that these facilities were still advertised as being available. Okay, I know we could get semantic here and make a distinction between the facilities being available (which technically speaking, they were) and functional or operational (which they were not). However, I believe that the average traveler would equate facilities that are listed as available as also being functional, and felt that if they were not functional, this should be clearly indicated on the website.

I phoned the Days Inn customer service number and was told that a fax would be sent to the hotel management immediately and someone from the motel would get in touch with me shortly, at most within a day or two.

The next morning, upon checking out, I inquired about this. The desk clerk knew nothing about the situation and the motel manager had not yet come in, despite the fact that it was already 11 o'clock in the morning. When I asked the clerk if she could give us a discount on the room rate or some other form of compensation, she said she couldn't. So I had no choice but to pay the bill and leave.

Two mornings later, we had still not heard anything, so I called customer service again. This time I got a representative that was definitely less sympathetic and helpful. She told me that according to Days Inn's agreement with its franchisees, the motel manager had up to 7 days to get back to me before they could do anything. SEVEN DAYS! Holy cow, which century are we living in?!!! We're not talking about creating the universe here! In today's high-speed world, customer service organizations have GOT to do a lot better than that! This issue should have been dealt with before we left the motel, because the only compensation that would have meant anything to us at that point is a financial discount of some sort. What is that particular motel going to be able to do after we're gone that will mean anything to us at all? We will probably never pass that way again.

In my humble opinion, any motel manager that doesn't deal with an issue before the customer leaves the premises just blew a great opportunity to turn a negative experience into some positive and very economical PR. For the cost of a 10% price discount, they could have had a far better return on advertising investment than most anything their marketing department could have come up with. I'd have told everyone about it!

And any motel chain that gives its franchise managers up to 7 days to respond to a complaint negates any claim to take customer service and satisfaction seriously. Days Inn offers decent facilities for decent rates. But our customer service experience at their Cleveland, MS, motel, and at the corporate level has us seriously reconsidering our plans to stay in any more of their facilities.

Sure, we could call ahead to verify things before we arrive, but we shouldn't have to. What we see on their website should be exactly what we get when we arrive there. However, I realize that screw ups can happen to anyone. That's okay, provided they are quickly and appropriately dealt with. But taking up to 7 days to do anything about a customer complaint merely adds insult to injury, and turns a simple molehill of customer dissatisfaction into a whole mountain of it. They're darn lucky I'm the type of person that just suffers quietly under injustice instead of whining and complaining to everyone about it! :P