After a terrible stay in Portsmouth Travelodge I thought I would contact the CEO direct.
*Update* I was given a 100% refund from Tavelodge and an apology.
Dear Grant Hearn (CEO Travelodge),
How are you? I am fine. Now I am anyway. I must admit it has taken me about a week to get over a visit to one of your hotels. I have never really used Travelodge before, not because I am a snob or because I live in a bin, but because I live and work in London and rarely find time to travel to exotic locations such as Portsmouth. In 2008, however, I traveled the world for a year and stayed in every form of accommodation from home stays, to jungle lodges, to a hotel made out of salt to sleeping on a beach; and the thing that all of these places have in common is that they are better than the Portsmouth branch of your hotel chain.
I was utterly disgusted with my visit from the moment of booking to the moment of check out. First of all I had to fork over £87.90 for the pleasure of staying in one of the UK’s most disgraceful towns! Have you ever been to Portsmouth? No! Of course you haven’t, you’re a CEO of a large company. If someone like you had to spend a night in Portsmouth you would probably order it to be shut down and the populous executed before whatever plague they were infected with had time to spread! Which is exactly what I wanted to do. Alas, I was left with no choice and went ahead with the booking in the hope that you had created a little Eden within the depths of hell. No such luck.
When I got to the hotel the man behind the counter was dismissive and it seemed like I had just disturbed his ‘private’ time, fairly rudely he instructed me to my room and placed the sticky key in my hand. All I wanted to do at this point was grab a cold drink and head to my room to shut out the terrors of the night. However nothing is easy in the land of Travelodge as the drinks machine was out of order. So I head up to my room as my soul sank into the sticky depths of the reception carpet.
After getting to my room desperately dehydrated from a long journey and a conversation with a self pleasing Neanderthal, I sought out a cup of tea where I was faced with 2 bases to the kettle which, actually, didn’t fit on either. So tap water it was.
Whilst sipping my mug of tepid water and wondering how quickly one dies of legionnaires disease, I noticed that the window in the room was broken, the wall paper was pealing, the bathroom had mold and the lampshades did not fit on the lamps without resting on the bulbs. My mother always told me that resting anything on a light bulb was a fire hazard and assumed that this was part of the grand plan.
Then, as if things weren’t bad enough, I was disturbed by a rabble of drunken louts rampaging down the corridor and right in to the room next to mine. When they were in the room the noise was not too bad, however they spent more time running up and down the corridors distributing Smarties and empty beer bottles as the went than they did in the room!
As the window in my room was broken and it was a summers eve, the temperature in my room soared to an unbearable degree and remained so all night. As such, every hour or so, I would have to get dressed and head out side so I could cool down. On one of my ‘night walks’ I was halted in my tracks by a young woman dressed only in her underwear throwing what appeared to be flour in the corridor and banging on doors. I wouldn’t have minded this experience as much as I did had she not been fat and quite clearly stupid. Upon telling your hotel manager of this event his exact words were ‘It’s baby powder, not flour’!
Since the manager that you have entrusted to represent your company image clearly had no idea of how to deal with customers and smelt very much like a strip club floor, I decided not to pledge my full complaint to him and, instead, contact you directly.
I hope this email finds you well and I look forward to a speedy reply.
Many thanks
AJ
Displeased Customer
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