Howard Johnson Inn & Suites Tacoma Near McChord AFB

For $50 a night, I knew I was getting a cheap room, and the bed was comfortable and the bathroom fixtures worked fine. Breakfast was typical, too. The room itself was in rough shape despite being clean. The curtains were hanging from just a few hooks, and the TV had been removed but its bracket and the unpainted patch were still on the wall. There was a big cigarette burn on a couch cushion. The living area had only one dim light, which made it hard to work at the desk. If you can live with flaws like those and just need somewhere cheap to crash, it could work.

People were outside working on cars at 10pm, and there were shady characters around the hotel. The place also wasn’t non-smoking as advertised: when we opened our room door, cigarette smoke hit us. Inside, we found missing door locks, burn marks on the toilet, walls needing repair, burn holes and stains on the couch, and knife marks on the ottoman. We checked out right away. After months of contacting management, they still wouldn’t refund us. We even have a video showing the room’s condition. I’m very disappointed they chose to treat customers this way, and I can’t recommend staying here.

The breakfast area smelled like Pine-Sol, and the food came in shared open containers, including cream cheese and peanut butter. The coffee cups and tables were dirty. Other guests saw the open containers and turned around and left, too. The room and building were awful: dirty carpets and walls, holes in the door, and dumpsters right outside our door. The receptionist said there had been a fire, and I was so fed up I said I wished the whole building had burned down. The door looked like it had been pried open before, and the deck looked ready to fall off. There was a big spider in the bathroom, and the sink wouldn’t stop running; its faucet moved in every direction. I’ve never stayed somewhere so dirty, and the online pictures didn’t match the building. We’ll never stay there again.

The only real positives were the suite’s size, since each one has two adjoining rooms, the nice staff, a decent free breakfast, and WiFi that was fairly reliable, if slow. The rest was bad. One toilet wouldn’t fill its tank, and I had to switch off the cooling unit because it squealed so much it was hard to sleep. There were wet, sticky spots on the carpet. The pool was closed for construction, a large shipping container sat in the parking lot, and the rooms were bare, without even a TV channel list.