Spearfish Travelodge Review – Never Again

I offer this review of a recent trip to Spearfish, South Dakota, where we stayed at the Travelodge. I cannot recommend this motel to others; what follows is a recap of our experiences.

Background: we stayed six nights (Saturday through Thursday nights) in early July 2009.

Spearfish Travelodge Problems, roughly in chronological order:

• Swimming Pool: The swimming pool was in the midst of demolition and reconstruction, despite their assurances two months prior that it would be available by the time we arrived. To their credit, they offered to reimburse admission to the local rec center’s swimming facility / water park.
• Wifi: For the first four nights, the wifi could be described as “intermittent” at best. Quite often we’d connect to the local network (get a 169.254.x.x address) but would be unable to route to the internet. On the fifth night, we were never able to connect at all, even after having the management reboot their router a couple times.
• Breakfast: The hotel’s breakfast offerings were weak, consisting only of coffee, juice, and bread products (toast, cereal, waffles). Noticeably missing was any sort of fresh fruit.
• Housekeeping: The day after we arrived, housekeeping did not make up our room until some point after 16:45. They were a little earlier on subsequent days but I believe it was always after noon. Given there were four of us, we had four sets of bath linens (towels, washcloths, etc). One day, they took away the four dirty sets of linens and only left two sets as replacement.
• Maintenance: On the fifth evening, the glass cover (approx 12″ in diameter) dropped off of the main ceiling light in our bedroom. Fortunately it didn’t break when it hit the floor and nobody was standing under it. We also noticed mildew in the bathroom.
• Attitude: Compounding the various physical problems, the staff’s attitude didn’t help. They kept pointing at my computer as the wifi problem before finally admitting on the last night that it was an issue with our room’s location. When we checked out, I had to argue to get a receipt. WTF?

I wasn’t expecting W quality at the Travelodge, but the wifi failure and general state of disrepair was disturbing. Spearfish has quite a few motels and hotels; I’d highly recommend that folks look elsewhere if they want decent accommodations.