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| - You know the old saying about lipstick on a pig. That applies to the Ramada Downtown, a relic in desperate need of some updates and renovations. Despite their many efforts to counteract the dated facility with quality service, there is little here that I can recommend considering the over $200 a night price tag.
I'll start with the good. The service, like I said, is exceptional. Everyone who works here is attentive and follows through with their duties. It's also relatively quiet at night, which is due more than anything to Calgary's ghost town of a downtown after 10 pm. Strange to say, the biggest plus in my mind is...their water pressure. By God it's good. While most hotel showers feel like the water is being lazily hand-pumped from a basement fifteen stories below, here it radiated off my body and massaged me into submission in the corner of the tub.
Now the bad. Where to start? The wi-fi reception is spotty at best and cut out on me several times. Only a couple channels can be received through the TV's horrible "digital" reception. There is no bottled water in the rooms and the soaps provided smell horrible. And the vending machines, at least on two of the three floors I visited, didn't even work.
What really made this a mediocre experience was that pretty much everything is dated. The whole hotel, from the furniture to the drapes to the elevators to the coffee cups in the restaurant downstairs, look as if they haven't been touched or replaced since 1984. It's all in working order, but I like a hotel that feels like what I'm paying for and not something frozen-in-time.
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