Our stay at the Quality Inn Creekside in Gatlinburg, TN was LESS than ideal…so much so that we checked out the next morning and stayed somewhere else! The sad part is I used another blogger’s review to decide to stay here, guess we had a completely different experience than they did!
I will preface this and say that I am a hotel snob and have been known in the past to make Mr. B check us out of hotels when we’ve found mold growing in bathrooms and other gross stuff like that. I was going out on a limb here because we’ve stayed in another similar star quality hotel and didn’t have a good experience there either.
So let’s get down to how I came upon reserving this hotel for two nights. We decided about 2 weeks out that we wanted to go to the Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge, TN area after the prices of airline tickets made a trip to Idaho out of the question for this summer. Well 2 weeks out isn’t enough notice to get good rates or military deals in this area, they go way to quickly. Also looking for a family of 5 is difficult, many of the 5 person rooms in the area were not available for the dates we needed. So I found a hotel and booked it but then a day before we were leaving realized that it didn’t have a safe and I didn’t want to take my big Canon to Dollywood with me, I wanted to leave it in a safe. So I scoured the internet to find a back up hotel and found a blog which recommended Quality Inn Creekside, so despite my initial reservation I booked there, and they had a military discount available…I guess that should’ve been my first clue…
We arrived and the parking was super tight, like the other blogger had said, but the room was also decent sized, but it had a musty/old cigarette smell to it….ding, ding, ding…warning lights going off in my head! We also had no 3G signal in Gatlinburg so we couldn’t use the internet on our phones in the area or in the hotel. Then we tried to connect to the wi-fi and it took forever to get logged in because when you’d press the connect button it wouldn’t do anything…it was so frustrating! Then when we finally got 1 device connected we found that despite being literally across from the main office we got the smallest bar signal possible and trying to surf the internet was like trying to to the backstroke in quicksand. I told myself ‘Ok this is not ideal but if Mr. B can sleep in bunks and worse conditions in Afghanistan then we can hunker it out here 2 nights.’
There was also supposed to be a roll-away bed in the room and when we asked at the desk upon arrival (like they told us to do) they stated that it would be in the room, if not to call back down to the office. Sure enough there was no roll-away bed and when Mr. B tried to call the office with the room phone it keep dying, he had to keep wiggling the cord to get it to finally work to allow him to call. Shortly after they brought up a roll-away bed.
Mr. B & the boys went to go get our luggage out of the car, we were on the 2nd floor, and the elevator was not working going down…say what? I know right? So you could go up, but had to take the stairs down, a sneaky ploy to get us to exercise or cost reduction…humm?
Here is the darned safe that caused all this drama! Which we didn’t even get to use because we checked out that morning!
We decided to walk down to the Ripley’s Aquarium and then go find something to eat. We walked so we wouldn’t have to worry about finding and paying for parking, the going rate seemed to be about $8, also the other blogger said it the hotel parking got crowded at night. Plus it also would’ve been a pain to get the Tahoe out and then back into the tight parking spots again that night. When we got back there was a note on the elevator that it would not stop at the first floor…wow, guess we’re lucky we were on the 2nd, but I wasn’t so sure about riding in an elevator that wasn’t functioning at 100%!
When we got back to the room, tired and ready to rest, we got out the roll-away bed only to discover that was severely dipped in the middle! Bea was NOT happy! You know how a bed is supposed to be flat, well it was like she was sleeping in a hammock! Mr. B finally got her talked into sleeping in it…thankfully since there wasn’t room for her anywhere else!
Then Bub went to get into bed and found a blood stain on his sheets, he was NOT happy, he ripped both the sheet and comforter off and said he was not sleeping with them, I did not blame him! It started to freak me out and make me wonder if they even changed the sheets up in this joint! Again Mr. B had to manipulate and try to get the phone to work to call to the front office. He finally gets through and was told that the person there was the only one in the office right then and it would be awhile before he could bring up new bedding, so Mr. B went down to get them. I’m guessing that they don’t have a full-time housekeeping staff?!
Sorry if that grosses you out…it did us too!
We got the bed changed and finally drop to bed exhausted, I turn the AC on cold and on medium speed because we like it cold at night. I woke up several times sweating! At about midnight I turned the AC on 10 (max cold) and High (max speed) and still no change…ugh. I finally get back to sleep…
Then at 3 am the straw that broke the camel’s back arrived! Mr. B woke up to go to the bathroom, he hadn’t been sleeping well on the hard beds…oh did I mention the were hard?! He sat at the end of the bed for a minute to orient himself and then felt something on his side. He walked to the bathroom and his side started to hurt so he lifted up his shirt and a wasp flew out!! It had stung him! How in the world it got inside his shirt while we were sleeping in the bed I have no clue!!! So he woke me up to tell me and Bub (who is afraid of wasps) heard him say wasp…and he immediately woke up and said ‘What a wasp?!’ Mr. B reassured him that he’d killed it and he could go back to sleep. I immediately checked our bed for any more, thankfully there were either no more our at least I couldn’t see them! Did I mention that Mr. B is allergic to wasps? So his side started swelling up to a large potato sized area, luckily I carry Benadryl in my purse so I gave him some. I should’ve took a pic of the wasp he killed but my brain at 3 am was not functioning properly!
We decide that we are NOT staying there the 2nd night so he tried to call the office, this time the phone was DEAD! No amount of wiggling or messing with the phone would get it to work. He then tried calling from his cell phone and it just rang and rang. So at 3 am we are desperately trying to get the internet to work to find a hotel that has a room available, knowing we’re going to be paying out the nose for it because of being last minute! We finally get travelocity up and found a nice hotel (more about that in another post) and quickly write down the phone number before the internet goes out. Mr. B calls and they had a room for us so he booked it.
The next morning Mr. B got up when the alarm went off and got me up to take a picture of the Smokey Mountains, which was a pretty sight, and to decide if we were going to be able to do Dollywood that day. He went and used the bathroom while I took the picture. I came in and used the bathroom and while I was in there I looked down at the floor and it was COVERED in ants!! The pic below is just 1 tiny section that I took a pic of with my phone! Mr. B had no idea and had been standing in them! Bub had spilled a milkshake the night before and we used a small towel to clean it up and then left it in the bathroom (thankfully we didn’t leave it in the room somewhere!), I guess they were coming to the milkshake party, sigh. Plus we were up 3 stories, the 1st floor is off the ground! Mr. B had to try to kill all the ants so that the kids would use the bathroom, Bub would’ve freaked out if he knew about them, so we just killed them and covered the floor with a towel until the kids were done in the bathroom.
We also noticed that the shower was draining super slow, at this point I’m throughly disgusted by everything and so ready to get outta there! We get everyone dressed and our stuff packed up an loaded in the Tahoe.
Mr. B walked over to the office to let them know we would not be staying the 2nd night and was told he needed to come back after 8 am when the manager would be in, so we decided to walk down and get breakfast and then deal with it when we got back. We were not about to eat the free breakfast there, we’d just been through too many gross things to even consider it! After breakfast Mr. B talked to the manager and gave him our list of issues and I do have to say that the manager was great about it all. He was super appreciative of the list to use to go take care of the issues and apologized for our crazy stay, he also refunded part of the cost of that night and cancelled our 2nd night stay.
Unfortunately I’m going to have to say that I do NOT recommend this place for the many reasons listed above! It was even too much for Mr. B who is not even a hotel snob like me and had recently spent 444 days sleeping in Afghanistan, this was far worse than that for him! I’ve learned my lesson the hard way, always check the ratings and comments on TripAdvisor before deciding that it’s OK because another blogger said so. I’d much rather pay $10-20 more a night to make sure we stay somewhere that suits our family better.
And that my friends, was the excitement of our trip, because you know we always have some! ;p
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