Hampton Inn & Suites Atlantic Beach

The room itself was clean and worked as expected, so no complaints there. What stood out was the mandatory $15 resort fee for amenities that may not even be available. Beach wagons and bikes are included, but there aren’t enough for all the guests, so you might not get to use them. You also get one alcoholic drink a day, or a bottle of water if you don’t drink. Just don’t grab the Fiji from the fridge. The alternatives are Aquafina or Pure Life, because apparently water comes in tiers. The room was fine, but their creative case for an extra $15 per day is what I’ll remember.

The stay itself was good, but I may keep going to Carolina beach, where there’s more to do. There was no breakfast, and the store didn’t have OJ. I wasn’t told the bistro was closed, so I had to get dressed and go looking for juice and breakfast. They said it was waiting for permits. The front desk could use more training. A manager never called me back, though my deposit was refunded in two hours after I’d been told it would take two weeks. I got no email response about the reservation, was transferred to a call center that turned out to be Expedia even though I hadn’t booked through a third party, and never got a receipt at checkout. Strange system. Read up on the policies. I might give the place another try.

Hotel Alice has a fancy exterior, but to me it’s like an Ikea coffee table with cardboard under a thin veneer. It’s listed as a three-star hotel, yet I’ve had better showers, linens, and mattresses at a Red Roof Inn. The shower spigot looks decades old, the plastic tub is cracked, and fixtures around the room are damaged. The floor has deep scratches, some wall patches were never painted over, and the lights don’t even match in color. They charge $25 if you want to check in 30 minutes early. That may be their policy, but nicer hotels have waived it when the room was ready within an hour. Someone else was asked to pay even when they were only five minutes early. The convenience store is wildly expensive too: two small Fiji waters, a half-price snack bag of chips, and a Pepsi cost over $20. The hotel’s supposedly great location comes with constant noise from a water treatment facility in the parking lot, which they don’t mention. Both our room keys stopped working at different times, even though we kept them away from phones and other cards. The staff were nice, but that doesn’t make up for the hotel’s poor condition.

Edit: The manager contacted us after our first stay and wanted to make things right. We appreciated that and decided to try again. This time was a lot better. The hospitality was very good, and I could tell they took our feedback seriously. Management was respectful and kind. Still, the rooms need better cleaning. The AC unit was black with dirt, and on the last night we woke up to a live cockroach in our bed. My wife and I had first stayed here for our anniversary. The location was nice and the room spacious, but it was very dusty, and nobody cleaned it during our four-day stay. More than once, the front desk clerk was away for over 20 minutes when we needed something. The biggest problem was the billing. They charged a $100 security deposit that never dropped off. When I called, the desk clerk gave me a fishy answer. The next day someone called to say it would be refunded. I asked whether it was a mistake or their usual practice, and she blamed a “tech glitch” in their “new system.” She didn’t hang up properly, and I heard her tell coworkers that she’d lied to me, that I was gullible, and that I was a nuisance. Lying about billing is a major red flag.