Today is our last day here in Chicago and tomorrow we’ll be flying to New York. Before booking our hotel here we did a lot of research to try to get the best value for money and get a hotel as close to the center as possible. In the end, we chose the Radisson Hotel which had a great offer and was sitting right on the famed Magnificent Mile. The Magnificent Mile of Chicago is the central shopping district - they claim it’s on par with Beverly Hills or New York’s Fifth Avenue - and just a short walk from everywhere.

Just steps from the hotel lies the Magnificent Mile

When we made our booking, we requested an early check-in and asked if they could upgrade us to a suite free of charge. Now, requesting a free upgrade is all well and good, but it’s not something that you usually get. So we were very pleasantly surprised when we checked in and were given a suite on the 35th floor. The bed faces a window with views of the skyline and the living room has great views of Lake Michigan.

The desk in our suite at the Radisson Chicago

In March 2008, the Radisson will reopen as the Avenue Hotel Chicago. And the photos we have seen of the remodeled rooms look cool. They all have an iMac on the desks, and in any case, the location of the hotel is perfect for a visit to Chicago.

Chicago is a beautiful city with a magnificent skyline and we will definitely miss it. There is so much to do and see, and in the week we’ve been here, we’ve only had time to see and do a handful of things!

Since we’ve reviewed two hotels over the past couple days, we decided to review one more that we stayed at in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This hotel ranked #1 for hotels in Chiang Mai in TripAdvisor at one point. The odd thing with the reviews is that the good ones all gave it 5 stars and the bad ones were horrendous and only gave it 1 or 2 stars.

Most reviews agreed that it was a bit out of the way, but that was part of the charm, so we booked a few days in the Sira Boutique Hotel, and a few days in The Field Village while we were in Chiang Mai. On the last day of our stay at the Sira Hotel, we mentioned to the owner that we would be staying at the Field Village and he told us it was right near the runway and could get quite noisy but to let him know what we thought.

Beautiful gardens at The Field Village.

Our first impression when we arrived at The Field Village was that the gardens were beautiful and the whole place had a sense of calm and serenity to it. Then we went into our room, or “cabin” as they call it, that’s when we were disappointed. The place looked very cheaply put together (and cost 50% more than Sira Hotel); the door only closed with a padlock or bolt, and there was a big gap under the door that we had to block with a towel to prevent insects from entering. We felt that for what we were paying, there were far better looking units at other hotels.

The door didn’t quite shut properly, leaving a wide gap underneath.

Nevertheless, we decided to give it a try and stay there a bit longer. Since the gardens and pool were so great, we also used them as a backdrop for some of Grace’s forex video blogs.

Here are some of the pros and cons of The Field Village Hotel:

Pros:

• Near the countryside with a view of rice paddies and mountains.
• Beautiful looking pool, lush landscape and lovely flowers.
• The food was quite ok and reasonably priced. Having said that, there were only a handful of dishes available at any given time and most of what was on the menu was just for show.
• Seemed like a good place for people who want to relax. See the noise issue below.

Cons:

• Inconvenient location. You can’t get a taxi from there and have to pay the hotel about US$7 for a ride into town. This is a lot for a place like Chiang Mai where most tuk-tuk rides can be had for a buck or two USD.
• Internet surcharge, yet unreliable connection. We had to pay for internet at this place, even though we emailed beforehand and it was insinuated that it would be included. And worst of all, the internet kept failing and we had to keep asking them to fix it. Each time we did, they seemed annoyed and would tell us how much it cost to get an IT technician over to fix their routers as if it wasn’t their problem.
• Noise from airplanes. Scratch the relaxing part from the pros, unless of course you find it relaxing to hear a plane landing every couple minutes or hear a formation of 5 fighter jets flying overhead.
• Service was definitely lacking. Most of the staff only spoke Thai, and only the owner lady spoke English, many times she seemed annoyed when we asked about things, especially when she was in the middle of a manicure or pedicure. And when she wasn’t getting one of those, she was out shopping so it was hard to ask her anyway.
• Overpriced tours. The tours cost 2 or 3 times more than what they cost in town. It was so bad that we ended up calling the friendly receptionist at the Sira Boutique Hotel and asked her to arrange our tours for us and pick us up at The Field Village. She got a commission for each tour she booked so at least we didn’t feel like we were annoying her
• The units were just not up to standard. The wood used to make them was still rough and many times the screws used to hold the pieces together had ended up splitting the boards. To think that this place was completed only a few months ago. We were almost afraid of leaning on the walls, not that we would anyway since they seemed dirty. The shower was also just a concrete floor with a shower-head above it and it took about half an hour for the hot water to come on, and when it did, it was boiling and only lasted a minute or two.
• Whatever you do, if you stay at this hotel, don’t get the oil/aromatherapy treatment at the spa. It was probably our worst spa treatment ever and we’ve been to a great many around Asia. Why was it bad? Well to start with, the people giving the massages had dirty hands, they also didn’t seem to know how to give a proper massage and just rubbed the oil over us for the two hours we were there. We were so bored we felt like getting up and leaving half way through

While we were staying there, we saw several great reviews posted on Tripadvisor by people who weren’t even staying at the resort (there are only like 10 units and not many were occupied). This, and several other travel experiences have made us believe that Tripadvisor is full of fake comments and pretty useless at helping us find information about places. It seems that Tripadvisor is now full of hotel employees and owners leaving fake comments about their hotels.

Yesterday we blogged about a bad experience we had with customer service at Furnished Quarters, and today we’ll blog about one of the best customer service experiences we had in a hotel. It was at Le Meridien in Kota Kinabalu.

We arrived in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo, on a short 45-min flight from Sandakan, Borneo, but we had gotten up before 6am to make the flight. It was probably about 10:30am when we got to the hotel, which is way before check-in time, but we were tired and wanted to get something to eat so we really wanted to try to get our room before the check-in time at 2pm. The front-desk clerk was very friendly but said that right now none of the free rooms had been cleaned yet but he would get one cleaned asap. Since we were hungry, we left our luggage with the bellman after many assurances that everything would be kept safely locked up including our laptop, and were about to head out for lunch when the front-desk clerk called us and said he had managed to get us a room and it would be a free upgrade to a bigger sea-facing room, something we hadn’t even asked for.

Needless to say, with that initial service, we were pretty confident we would have a great stay. And throughout our entire stay, the staff did everything necessary to make sure we had a great time!

Beautiful view from our window!

And the service wasn’t the only thing we liked about Le Meridien: the room was beautiful, with a lovely view of the South China Sea and of the many fishing boats going in and out of the small local pier. There was also free internet access in the room and by the pool (which had wonderful views as well), and we were able to get our work done in such a great environment that it almost didn’t feel like work!

The food at the hotel was also great, although we usually went across the street to a nice little Italian restaurant for food.

All in all, our experience was so good that when it was time to go, we just didn’t want to leave!

We haven’t yet stayed at Furnished Quarters (Jersey City) so we can’t give a review of their unit yet. What we can say is that, so far, trying to book a unit has been an absolute nightmare. Our first problem was the back and forth of emails trying to check for availability, in each email there was a different set of availability and it was hard to find all that was available where we wanted.

When we finally found one that we wanted to stay in the booking problems began. First they wanted a deposit of $1000 USD which would only be returned 45-60 days after check out. Next they wanted more information about us than what we’d need if we were getting a loan to buy the place. It made us wonder if this wasn’t some ploy at identity theft. Once we provided all the information they needed they wanted information like bank statements which we were most definitely not willing to provide! We just wanted to stay there, not transfer all our assets to their firm!!

That was worked out after hours on the phone with them and we finally went ahead with the booking. Only to find that they charged us one more day than we would have been charged in a hotel!! When we contacted them they said they charged in days not nights and that even though we could only check in after 4pm on the first day and we have to check out before 12am on the last day they would still charge them as full days. I’ve been quite involved in the travel industry and developing computer systems for them for years and I’ve never seen something so ludicrous! In many countries this would be considered false advertising and be illegal!

All we want is to stay at the unit at the price we were quoted for the number of nights we want to stay. Now they’ve already charged our card for the full stay plus the deposit and the extra night that they say is the normal way they charge and they say they can’t do anything about it.

Yes! Definitely different from a hotel, at least in a hotel they don’t charge you for time you don’t stay there!

The unit had better be absolutely amazing to make up for all this nonsense or we wouldn’t even recommend them to our worst enemy. So if you’re thinking of staying with them, be prepared for more red tape than a Soviet Bureaucrat and more tricks to get your money than a second-hand car dealer would use!

Update: The reason we wrote about this in the first place was because they said they would return our calls and didn’t. We had hoped to let people know about the problems we faced so that they could be forewarned. We also expected that Furnished Quarters would maybe call or email us to sort this out, or even leave a comment explaining their policy and what they would do to help us. What we weren’t prepared for is for Furnished Quarters to leave 4 fake comments pretending to be customers who had stayed with them

In one of those comments, they even seemed to insult us, their customers, who have paid a not small amount to stay in their units and haven’t even stayed there yet! I sure hope this isn’t their corporate policy as it would show a total lack of customer service!

How do we know it came from Furnished Quarters? All of them came from IP address: 63.116.172.66 which belongs to Furnished Quarters. (If you’re a tech person look it up with whois.)

Latest Update: Gary Brown, president of Furnished Quarters contacted us and has agreed to all the things we thought were reasonable for staying at the unit such as charging by nights, etc. He also offered to give us a full refund if we didn’t stay there, or to refund us without penalty if we were unhappy with the unit when we arrived. In addition he said he was investigating the fake comments from an “overzealous” employee. We think this is a good example of how corporate management should handle a situation like this, and we will give him a chance to show us what Furnished Quarters is like by giving their accommodation a try.