Western Motel

It’s really quiet here, so I sleep well, which matters a lot when I’m traveling for work. I’m on the road for business often and stay in plenty of motels, and Western Fitzgerald is a cut above. The staff are friendly, the maids do a great job, and everything in the room works. The WiFi is great too. I’ll be back.

The room was clean, and check-in and check-out were easy. It did take a few minutes for someone to come to the night window when we checked in. There isn’t much of a breakfast. The main issue was the heat: when we arrived around 10:30 pm, the room was really hot, and it took more than an hour to cool down after we started the AC. You get what you pay for.

From the first time I spoke to the owner, she was extremely rude. I asked for a non-smoking room because of our daughter and said we smoke outside, but she insisted on giving us a smoking room and threatened an extra $300 if we didn’t accept it. She also makes guests take their towels to the lobby themselves instead of having room service knock. The hotel washes the sheets but not the blankets. I tried to hand them over because we bring our own, and she said they don’t get washed. She also misrepresented the price. I was told one week would be $235 plus tax, but my card was charged $307. She insists the $72 difference was all taxes. I’ve known many foreign business owners, and usually they adjust to our culture and are polite, often more polite than people born here in America. This woman who runs the motel has such an attitude that, if my card hadn’t already been charged when she got really rude, I would have cussed her out. I don’t generally swear much, as you can probably tell. On weekends, people also use the parking lot for drug deals. I’d stay away and tell others not to come.

We were seven people and an infant, traveling for leisure, with three rooms for four nights. Our room was old but clean, and seemed to have been remodeled recently. We got lucky with cleanliness, though: my friends in the other two rooms reported a strong smoker’s smell despite having non-smoking rooms. Later we caught the housekeeper smoking in a room while cleaning it. Room service was poor. There were three of us, but they kept leaving only a couple of hand towels and no bath towels, and would make just one of the two beds. In a separate incident, management changed the locks on one friend’s room while we were away because they said they heard a dog barking. My friends had paid to bring the dog, and it had been with them all day, not in the room. There’s an outdoor pool and a weight room. We didn’t use the pool because it was too cold, but the weight room looked like it was being remodeled, or at least I hope so. The carpet was torn up, and it smelled awful, like a mix of moldy sewer and body odor. This was our first visit to Fitzgerald, and even though we plan to return, we won’t stay at this motel again.