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| - I just returned from a trip to Scottsdale and staying at Hotel Valley Ho.
Have a seat, get a drink and get comfy. This is going to be a doozy.
I picked up my rental car & headed to Hotel Valley Ho. The entrance to the hotel is off the main road & actually 'behind' it. Kinda strange but I thought maybe it was an "AZ" thing. I pull up to check-in and I'm told that it's valet parking ($14/day) if I want to leave my car to go check-in. I ask where I should park if I want to self-park. I am told that it's next door in the Trader Vic's parking lot.
So I turn the car around and go park 'next door'. Let me say that it is NOT close and there are no sidewalks! So you end up walking on the road as you can't push your luggage through the grass.
So after I walk back to the front of the hotel to check-in, the first thing I encounter is a group of drunken girls in bikinis hooting & hollering at the valet staff. They are having some sort of flirtatious interaction and I thought "What did I get myself info?"
I check-in without too much trouble & I head up to the 6th floor to my room. The room seems nice enough although I found a little odd at first that some of my light switches didn't appear to 'do' anything. I leave to meet a gf for dinner so I don't bother to try to figure out what's going on.
We head to dinner & arrive back to the hotel around 9pm. It is now dark in Scottsdale as the sun has set. I had to walk to the hotel from the Trader Vic's parking lot (in the dark, on the street since there is no sidewalk). I did not feel safe AT ALL and there is not great lighting along the walk back to the hotel.
I retreat to my room and think that maybe I'll take a bath since the tub is so large and deep. That is one thing that is 'good' about the hotel is the bathroom is nice & over-sized.
I now realize that my lights aren't working since the room is so dark. It's quite strange as there's no reason why it shouldn't be. I proceed to mess with all the switches in the room and still can't turn on anything but the entry way lights.
I call the front desk to ask for assistance. The girl tells me she'll send maintenance up. 20 mins go by - nothing. Shocker. I call again and am rudely told that she'll try again to call maintenance. A gentlemen finally shows up but I hear him knocking next door. I open my door and ask him if he means to come to my room.
He tells me that he has to go next door to check the circuit breaker. Sure enough, somehow the lights in MY room got turned off because of the circuit breaker. Why would you check someone into a room and have it have bad light switches?
Another odd side note: There was no hotel directory in the room. You know, the one that tells you when the pool's open, what they offer in the hotel. But they had plenty of books & magazines for you to read. So I kept having to call the front desk if I had a question.
I had purchased wifi ($9.99 for 1MB or $14.99 for 3MB) and it was incredibly slow. It was to be 24 hours for that fee. I had a business meeting for half the day and I returned around 8pm. When I attempted to re-connect to the wifi, it wasn't working.
Now I'm a tech savvy girl, it was clear the router was down & needed a reboot. When I called the front desk (again), I was told that they'd have to send the IT guy up as 'they can't troubleshoot'.
So after a long sweaty workout in their "24 hour gym", I had to sit and wait for the IT guy to come to my room. It was the same guy who had been the maintenance guy. He watches me try to connect to the wifi and it fail. And then his solution was to have me wire in via USB.
It worked after a few attempts but what's the point of wifi if you're going to have to wire in?
Then in the morning, I was going to check my email before I flew out and found that the "24 hour internet service" I paid for apparently reset at midnight. So instead of having a real '24 hour' clock, I had a 15 hour clock. That is ridiculous to charge $14.99 for internet that didn't work half the time and then timed out earlier than it should have.
The pool was nice although I never got to spend any time 'in' it. I tried to catch some sun before I had to head out for the day. It was absolutely dead. Quiet. When I returned home at 4pm and debated the pool, it was full of douches. They had opened up a bar and DJ booth and the music was clear all the way up to my 6th floor closed door patio.
I can see why some reviewers have said the scene is all about eye candy.
I also had breakfast in Cafe Zuzu one morning and the waitress was horrible. (I'll write a separate review about that).
Overall, the hotel had potential to be nice but they lost it all in the lack of service and the "I don't care" attitude.
If you don't want to be in hospitality, then don't. But don't punish those who travel for the fact that you are miserable. It also was quite steep (over $200/night) and don't feel it offered anything worthy of that.
I'll never make an appearance again.
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