The Stanley Hotel

No doubt, this is an elegant, old hotel with a rich and interesting history. I spent two nights there and I will likely not stay there again. The hotel is an impressive sight and will likely meet your expectations for an old, historic property. The lobby is wrapped in dark wood walls and trim. The stairs are built from the same dark woods and creak the way you would expect them to when you walk up and down. The elevator is small and slow and gives you a feel for life in the early 1900s. There are old photos hanging on all the walls showing how people vacationed when the hotel was new. The rooms, which, of course, have been upgraded over the years, have some features that have otherwise been left behind in more modern hotels like thick wood trim around all the doors and windows, and wooden crown and baseboard moulding around the ceiling and floor, and marble countertops in the bathroom and bedroom. So, if you come to the Stanley with the intention to soak up the history, maybe take advantage of some of the tours and other experiences that are offered, and if you appropriately set your expectations to match what you would see in a 115 year old hotel, you might be satisfied. But I ran into some, admittedly small, but some other not so small problems. I'll talk about the small (some would justifyably say "nit-picky") problems first. It would have been nice to have a larger mirror in the room, maybe hung on one of the doors. There was no chair or desk in the room. There was no trash can in the bedroom. The lighting in the bathroom was poor (very dim). There were no soap dishes on either the bathroom sink or in the shower. What are you supposed to do with the bars of soap that the hotel provides? The bathroom sink was poorly installed leaving an unsightly, sloppy gap between the sink bowl and the marble countertop. (This oversight was inconsistent with what I expected from a somewhat more expensive hotel and simply introduced a bad impression about the overall, underlying quality of the maintenance of the hotel and, of course, the hotel itself.) There was no safe in the room. There was no refrigerator in the room. Here are some of the bigger issues that I ran into. The information I received said that the rooms in the main hotel (where we stayed) had no air conditioning. OK. I knew that going in and decided that would be OK. When we got to the room, there was, in fact, something like an air conditioner "connected" to the window and sitting on the floor (see photos). It was ... interesting, and I think it might have worked, but was certainly unexpected. The shower in the bathroom and, specifically, the shower faucet control was a real puzzle (see photos). First, when you rotated the shower handle, it just went around and around without any specific starting or stopping point. I mean, it was not loose. It felt functional, but there was no way to tell what was "on" or "off" or where hot or cold was. In fact, when I first rotated the handle, I could not get water to come out of the shower at all. And I thought, "uh oh". Then, when water started coming out, I could not figure out how to get hot water. Then, I could not figure out how to shut it off. I spoke to the woman at the front desk, who was very friendly and pleasant. She said she would send an "engineer" to look at it while I was at dinner. After dinner, I checked with the front desk and was told that the problem had been fixed. I went up to the room and the problem had not been fixed. I decided to just deal with it. The next night, the temperatures dropped into the low 30s. I set the thermostat in the room to 72 degrees and waited. The baseboard heating never got the least bit warm. Again, I went to see the friendly woman at the front desk. She was wearing a coat and talking to another guest who was telling her that his room was cold. The woman said that the heat in the hotel had been deliberately turned off. (WHAT?) She offered the man what she thought was her last space heater. When she had finished with him, I asked her what I was supposed to do. She said she would bring some extra blankets to the room and try to get another space heater. Some time later, she showed up at the room with blankets. A little while after that, a man came to the room and handed me something that he said was a space heater. I took it, looked at it, and saw that it was nothing more than a fan. I returned the fan to the nice woman at the front desk. She said her engineer was working on another problem but had found another space heater and he would deliver it to the room later on. I waited. No space heater ever arrived. We piled on the blankets and slept through it. The heat never came on and the room was at 63 degrees when we woke up the next morning. (see photos). When I checked out, the woman at the desk (a different woman) asked how our stay was. Well ... I explained about the problems with the room, the shower and the lack of heat. She said that the heat had been turned on, but I never saw any evidence of it. And my wife told me that when she went down to the coffee shop in the hotel for a latte, they said they were cold because there was no heat. I asked the woman at the front desk if she could make an adjustment to the bill to compensate for the inconveniences. She asked what I had in mind and I thought, why not try for something "ambitious". So I asked for one of my nights to be free. She said that this was an interesting time at the hotel because they were in the process of changing management. She would have to check with her new manager to see what she could do and would call me with an answer. There was no fix to the shower. There was no space heater. There was no heat turned on in the hotel. There was no phone call about the adjustment to the bill. (There will likely be no adjustment of any type to the bill.) There is a little bit of a customer service problem at the Stanley.

Our room aircondintioner was broke, and the ceiling fan did not work. When we told this to the desk staff, they gave us the e-mail for the manager, and we never heard another word from anyone. This place is over rated and definetely over priced. Stay at another hotel if you want a good nights sleep.

A a quick overnight staying in the lodge along with the Shinning Tour. Had a late lunch of gluten fried chicken yummy, then wonderful brunch before we left town. Our waiter for brunch was extremely knowledgeable about the menu and efficient. Thank you everyone.

I have never spent so much to be that miserable in my life. Don’t get me wrong, the staff and the facility were 5 stars. BUT I cannot get over the lack of attention paid to the environment in my room. I checked into room 402 and immediately was hit with a wave of heat. It was in the upper 80’s outside and the air conditioning was not even on, let alone set at a temperature bearable for a guest. The temperature showed the room at 82 degrees. I turned on the small floor air conditioner at maximum and, since it was evening, opened the window in the 2nd window. I called the front desk to fix the air conditioning in the sitting area only to find out it was just a temperature gauge. It took until 5:45 in the morning for it to reach 72 degrees. How can a place like this not be cognitive of the comfort of its guests.

Stepping into a hotel built in 1909 transports you to a time and place where people were not owned by their screens. The lobby, ball room, and music room evoke a longing for a time when the desire for connection was met with dancing, music, and games. However, those rooms are all roped off, which is quite unfortunate as so much could be done to revive a bygone era or at least allow passage. As I entered I was welcomed by a girl dressed in gothic attire asking if I was checking in for the seance. Bypassing the opportunity to dance with the devil, I proceeded to the front desk where I was given a keycard and discovered the assigned room was in a resort across the street, not even part of the main property. I was quite confused as I had booked directly from the Stanleys website. I was presented with an unexpected 20% upcharge if I opted to stay in the Stanley itself. Since we had just finished the 1997 miniseries of the Shining on Amzn Prime (which was filmed entirely at this location unlike the first 1980 version) and made the trip specifically for this reason, I gulped and paid the piper. Our room was quaint and cute but quite drafty and cold. So we turned up the thermostat and retired with our children. My wife and I huddled together as we waited for the room to heat up. We both woke from the cold and realized the baseboard heaters were doing nothing, so we turned the heater up higher, and did so each time we awoke. We did not call the front desk because doing so would have disturbed our slumbering children and in our drowsy state we expected that eventually the heat would kick on with our latest adjustment, which never happened. So we naively toughed it out. The thin doors had us awoken all too early from noise in the hallways and early knocking by housekeeping. Exhausted from the 16 hour commute the day before, skipping an hour due to daylight savings time, and facing a 10 hour drive ahead we realized we simply needed more rest. Expressing the difficulty of our sleep to the manager, we asked if they might comp or discount us another night given the fact our room had no heat. The managers reply was as cold as the night we endured, sorry, but we should have called during the night and they would have brought us space heaters or more blankets (indicating this is clearly a common issue). I was met with a blank stare when I suggested they might just have a thermostat that works properly instead of shifting the blame to guests for not seeking out their unknown resources in the dead of night. We were offered an insulting 10% discount and nothing more despite our protest. I'm also fairly certain the thermostat is just intended for a placebo effect, there was no surprise at all by the staff that it was malfunctioning. So the two stars is primarily for the poor response to a very poor night of sleep (which later placed our lives at risk on the road). I would not dissuade anyone from coming and taking in the charm of this hotel, but I would suggest you only visit the grounds while staying elsewhere for better sleep. Anyone is welcome on these premises and we saw many folks exploring the hallways and lounges who were likely not guests. They have a couple of restaurants, offer tours, and have gift shops and historic displays, all which are reasons to stop by without overpaying for a drafty room.