The museum is pretty much like other museums in other cities around the world. Exhibitions are decent, facilities are good enough for customers to enjoy the experience. Overall, not a bad experience when it came to enjoying art.

However, we lost our umbrella there, and this is the reason why we put down this terrible one-star review. The day we visited was a rainy day in Montreal. We had to drop off our bags anyway but the staff refused to take the umbrella and told us we can put the umbrella near the tickets selling counter. It’s out in the public, not inside the counter where there are staff looking over it. We understood if we put it out there, it has a risk to be either stolen or mistakenly taken.

So, that was the context. What got us feeling not happy about this is that while we were waiting for the manager to come out to file a complaint, we saw some customers took out the umbrella together with the bags they dropped off and some customers brought the umbrella out from the facilities with them.

Basically, there is a miscommunication for the customers to know what they can do and can’t do. If the staff refused to take umbrellas, then why other customers can and we were told not to? And how much effort to add a few words to let customers know that they can either put the umbrella at the public area or bring with them if they don’t want to take risk? We thought we can’t bring the umbrella with us in the exhibition.

You may think we’re so serious about just an umbrella, yeah if it’s just a normal one we can buy any where in Walmart or any supermarket. No! This umbrella was a souvenir we got in Ottawa before traveling to Montreal. So, there is an emotional attachment to us regarding the umbrella.

We did file a complaint as how we think it should be a procedure needed to be done. The manager (Richard, If I remember correctly) was good at customer service, and understanding but the staff at the belongings dropping off area is such a disappointment. We are also disappointed at the people who took our umbrella, whether or not it is intentional but unfortunate incident like this could be avoided if the staff is trained to communicate with customers better. Having a big number of customers coming in and being busy is not an acceptable excuse for a lack of well-trained customer service communication.

We were told there were quite a few customers experienced same umbrellas lost like us, so is it wrong to say the fault is on the responsibility of the facility to keep the properties of the customers? I don’t think it’s logic to blame to customers. Who would be blamed? Us or the people who took other people properties away without permission?

Hope they do better in the future. A lot of places we traveled around can put a tag on the belongings that can’t fit the lockers to make sure customers belongings are well kept, no matter how valuable the items are.

Ultimately, good art exhibition, terrible customer service!