Anonymous
This is a letter I wrote today 3/7 to send to the Holiday Inn Vacation Club main offices.
This week, I booked an ambassador unit at the Hill Country Resort in Canyon Lake for a vacation for my family. This was not only be a nice vacation; however, my husband and I were also celebrating our anniversary this week as well. We arrived late Saturday night and were in room 514. Then left early Sunday 3/4 morning to take my mother to some family about three hours west of San Antonio. We arrived to our room quite late that night and went straight to bed. That morning 3/5 , my father-in-law and his wife were to be visiting us for the next couple days. We had gone to get a fishing license for my husband the night before so that he could go fishing with his father and picked up extra groceries to accommodate the extra guests and so that we would not have to go out to eat while we were visiting. That morning, after fixing breakfast, I was straightening up around the condo. As I was straightening up my daughters room, I saw a bug crawling on her bed. I called my husband in to see what I found as I could not place what type of bug this was. He seemed to think it was a bed bug and called down to the front to get maintenance or someone to come and fix this situation. About 10-20 minutes later, three men walked in wearing black vinyl gloves. My husband took them to the room in which we found the bug. They began searching the bed with the sheets on top and found nothing; however, when they took the sheets off, they found blood stains that are often found when you have bed bugs. The maintenance men pointed out the stains on the mattress. They then began to take the bed apart and as they raised the box spring up, they saw more evidence of the bed bugs. The maintenance at that point, began to point out all of the bugs in the bed. They then said that they would be bringing stuff to sterilize our items. My husband then asked the maintenance men, what are we allowed to take with us and what needs to be left behind. They also told us after returning our items, we would need to clean everything. This would include all of the clothes and all surfaces of everything we brought. We were told to bring only our electronic devices and what we had on us and wait until they were done. Now, with a three year old child at lunch time and also getting close to nap time, this was very difficult for us to just sit in the new room, 524 a penthouse ambassador room. We at this time, were planning on having my husbands family come and visit; however, after this situation, they decided to not come and go to Corpus Christi instead because of the bed bug situation. Due to the time of day, we had to drive into town and hope my child would not have any accidents due to her potty training as we did not have any clothes or pull-ups with us as we were not allow to take these with us because of the bugs. As we drove into town, we stopped at a store to kill some time before getting lunch. While at the store, my daughter had an accident. With no extra clothes to put her in, I had to buy panties, socks, and clothes. I searched for the cheapest thing I could find in this store at the time in order to change her to continue on her day. We then went to eat lunch. As we were eating, we were talking about all of the cleaning we would have to do. I knew that we would have to wash everything and wipe down all surfaces of everything we had brought with us. After eating, I ran into a store to purchase something for us to wear while waiting for our clothes to be washed as we were worried that we might have some bugs on us as well and knew we needed to wash what we had on as well. We then had to go to the grocery store to purchase trash bags to bring isolate items in, Clorox wipes to clean all surfaces, tide and bounce to wash our clothes, and a cleaner to clean all of my daughters toys that we had brought. By this time, we had spent, over $250. As we came back, we stopped by the front office to try to speak with someone as we had still not really heard from anyone in regard to this situation. At this point, it was 4:45 and had been waiting since about 9:30 for a response to this situation. We stopped to speak with a manager and were greeted by the front desk person. She walked to the back and was gone for several minutes to return to say that the manager was unavailable. We waited around a bit more and then my husband walked back in to check on the status of the manager. He asked when the manager would be leaving for the day and was told 5:00. He responded that she will be calling us then within the next 5 minutes as I know you had plenty of time to go and speak with the manager while you walked to the back. Within less than 5 minutes we heard from the manager. She brought us into her office at this point. We explained the situation to her and how frustrated and upset we were about all of the lost time and money we had to spend because of this situation. She was very smug with us and seemed to only brush us aside offering a gift card. She also smugly said, “All you have to do is just put stuff in a dryer to get the bugs away.” Oddly enough, the maintenance men told us a bit more telling us that we not only had to do this, but we had to wash everything including all clothing and items. They even told us they would give us something to clean things with, which never happened. This is also why we purchased cleaning supplies ourselves. I left that room very upset and could not believe how I had been treated as I have been with this property since the 1990’s. That night, we immediately got to working on cleaning everything. As soon as we entered the new room, we changed our clothes and took showers. We then changed into our new night clothes that were purchased because of this situation. We then began laundry and then cleaning down every surface with Clorox. Once my husband had clothes to wear, he took the blankets and bags that could be washed down to the main building to use the laundry facility to use multiple washers at once. We continued to clean until after midnight before we finally finished with the cleaning.
Finally, problem number two…After finishing up with breakfast in the second unit, I was cleaning up the dishes and was about to place some items in the dishwasher. As I opened the dishwasher, I saw a roach. Not what I would expect, especially since I told the manager the last time we were in the building we had been staying in we had issues with roaches. I continued to clean up and then another roach continued to crawl across the cabinet. The day before alone, was more than I could handle, or so I thought…now I was dealing with roaches. I finished getting ready and my family went to the front office again. We spoke with the manager, Stephanie again about this situation. She basically, told us all she would do is give us a gift card and give us back the 6 days of time for the vacation. I explained to her I really did not want to stay on the property and would like to be sent to another Holiday Inn property somewhere in New Braunfels or in San Antonio instead. She left and then came back and said that she could not do this for us; however, would put us in another ambassador penthouse room. During this time, I asked her to give me some time to think about what to do as I could not just go home as I had to stay until Friday to go and pick up my mother from where I dropped her off on Sunday. I then stepped outside and tried to call Holiday Inn Vacation Club. I spoke with someone in regard to this issue. She tried to get me to a supervisor; however, she ultimately told me that that department was doing training and she could not get to a person for me to speak with. She did say that she was emailing someone to call me to speak about this issue. As of today, this still has not occurred.
- Bedbugs Found
- Requested Refund
