Hampton Inn Searcy

I’ll have to stay here again next year because I can only use Hilton hotels, and I hope things improve by then. I wasn’t recognized as a Diamond member and there was no water or snacks. The hall carpets were very worn and dirty and need replacing, and the hall had no baseboards. Breakfast didn’t meet Hilton standards. The bacon was thin, translucent, and not fully cooked. The yogurt was served in a bowl without ice, so it was warm, and it wasn’t replenished often enough. The person checking us in during the evening also wasn’t dressed appropriately: they had on a large outdoor jacket, a knitted hat worn tall on their head, and a very long scraggly beard.

The room was spacious, clean, and modern, with a huge bathroom and a shower with good water pressure. There were lots of seating options in the lobby, and the hot breakfast was decent: eggs, sausage, potatoes, waffles, yogurt, cereal, several kinds of bread, and different juices. They did run out of dark roast coffee. The king bed seemed small, and my feet sometimes dangled over the edge. The pillows were too puffy, and not having outlets on one side of the bed was annoying. The night clerk was very accommodating about bottled water. Harding University campus is only about 7 minutes away.

I’m in hotels every day, and Addam at the desk did an amazing job today. We had rooms in less than 30 minutes because he knew his job, rearranged things in the computer, and checked with the cleaning staff. A lot of hotel desk workers are lazy and just say the hotel is sold out or your room isn’t available because they don’t want to deal with it or don’t know what they’re doing. I wish more desk clerks were as good at their jobs as Addam.

This hotel was really noisy. The walls and ceiling were paper thin, and the doors slammed louder than any I’ve heard. My room had some recent improvements, though they aren’t fully renovating the rooms: new flooring, new furniture, and a new bathroom shower door. But the construction company hadn’t connected the heat and air unit to the wall thermostat, so it couldn’t be turned off. The air conditioner stayed on high the entire time. I told the woman at the front desk, and she gave me batteries, but they didn’t fix the thermostat and she didn’t seem to care. I kept waking up every couple of hours because I was freezing, then got up again to plug the unit back in once the room felt stuffy and I needed the noise drowned out. It was a 28-degree night, and the room got below 60 degrees, with no need for AC.