You’re Here To Sleep, Not Eat!

We are a couple of middle-aged Brits who decide to take the holiday of a lifetime in Colorado and the Rockies. This is in the early 1990s before the Internet, and bookings have to be made by telephone. My husband’s first name sounds the same in the UK and the USA but is spelled differently.

We stay one night at a hotel in Denver which is part of a well-known international chain. It doesn’t go well! To start with, the key card will not unlock our room door, and we have to be helped by a member of the cleaning staff who is working nearby.

The next morning, around 8:30, we go into the restaurant for breakfast; we’re the only guests there. We are seated by the busboy who brings us coffee and disappears out the back. So, we sit, and sit, and finally, we call out:

Us: “Is there anyone here?”

No one appears, so we walk out. As we go through the door, a woman appears from nowhere, holding my husband’s spectacles case which he left on the table, hands it to him, and walks away!

We decide we will have coffee in the lobby, but no, all the containers are empty and all the cups are dirty.

We load up our car and go to the desk to check out. Eventually, someone comes to the desk and prints our bill, quoting the room charge and a forty-seven-dollars bar charge, spoken very quickly and quietly.

As we have been nowhere near the bar, we ask to see the bar bill, and we find that it is signed using the American spelling of my husband’s name. As soon as we point this out, the charge is immediately taken off the bill, so quickly that we get the impression that this scam happens all the time.

We have since had several holidays in the area — and love it! — but never would we stay at this hotel again, and the next time we drove past it, we saw that it was no longer part of the well-known international chain.