La Quinta Inn & Suites by Wyndham Baltimore Downtown — Hotel in Baltimore

If you want a QUIET place to stay and to ACTUALLY SLEEP, this is not the one. I will say the staff was friendly and did assist with what COULD be assisted with, but one was overly helpful to the point of hindering the process, most likely in an attempt to overcompensate. I'm going to break it down in categories of things that went wrong/ were wrong.

PARKING: I looked ahead of time and it said that there was a parking deck diagonally across from the front entrance, but that there was no parking at the hotel itself. I looked up rates for parking, prepared for that, and planned on it. We get there, and the street the hotel is on is frankly terrifying. It's not well lit and the road itself got worse the further down we went, things were boarded up, people were being loud and obnoxious, police cars with lights flashing every few blocks. We got there around 8:30pm after driving for multiple hours. The parking deck in question was gated up and closed off. Needless to say, we did not park there. It was gated off the entire time we were there. My fiancé calls the hotel and asks where we should park, which should be a simple enough answer. WRONG. The man who answered the phone gave an entirely too complicated answer, and basically told us that he would come outside and physically show us. I wouldn't park my car on the street for two days in Baltimore in a NICE area, let alone here and the concierge attempted to convince us to do so. We were speaking to him and asking him where else was an option because I was not comfortable with that and a few people that were outside screamed at us "We're not going to steal your car!", which is the exact wrong thing to say to someone who has in fact, had their car stolen before. I pulled away from the curb and we found a parking deck that was a five minute walk to the hotel. With luggage, it sucked, but we made it work.

THE ROOM: We get to our room and it's smaller than I was initially led to believe, but its got a bed and a shower so it works, no complaints there.

That is about the only thing I could not complain about. We enter the room and it is HOT. I understand that most hotels will set the thermostat to 70-75 degrees to keep the energy bill lower. It was on 80 degrees, when it was barely lower in temperature than that outside the building.

One of the windows was completely and FULLY OPEN with no screen at all, so there were multiple flies in our room. ALL the windows in the room are so high up the wall we had to climb into a chair to close it. We successfully do so, and think the issue is resolved. Wrong. It made absolutely ZERO difference. The windows were paper thin and had no soundproofing whatsoever. Between people being loud outside, the church bells ringing at all hours of the night, and the near constant police sirens, we got very little sleep.

Lamps were busted. Light switches were held together with tape and a prayer.(I cut my elbow open on it.) ZERO full sized towels in the room. Room Phone wasn't even attached to the landline to call for said towels. Food in the sink drain. Shower didn't work correctly. I could not tell you if they cleaned the room or just reset the bed and trash. The entire room was in disrepair with band aid fixes or left out in the open.

Now, you may be asking yourself why we did not bring any of this up to the hotel itself while we were there. Most of these things could not be fixed while we were there Every time we asked a question it was a Broadway production length answer to a simple question.

All of these seemingly tiny things could have been overlooked were it not for the lack of soundproofing on the windows. If you close the window, it should muffle the sound and it did basically nothing to help the outside noise be lowered. We may as well have left them open because there was no difference. The entire point of a hotel is to have somewhere to REST, and we did not get to do that at all. The entire stay was disappointing, unsatisfactory, and...

Over the years, I've stayed in many motels and hotels - from 5-star resorts to seediest motels that leave you with a sense of guilt for staying. Never really had much of an issue during any of my stays, even at the motels that I didn't really expect much from. If I did have an issue it was minor. So to encounter as many issues I had at the Laquinta Inn in Downtown Baltimore was a bit of a shock.

Now before I go any further let me explain a few things:

#1 - I understand that we are in a pandemic and many businesses are doing their best to stay open. Some businesses may be short-handed because they may have had to lay-off employees or cut back hours.

#2 - No, I did not call management to "fix" or correct any of the issues I had encountered. In order for me to give an unbiased and honest review, I felt I had to let this scenario play out just to see how much worse it can get. When you go into a hotel, there are some things that are expected. The bare minimum is that the room and building are clean.

So let's get into it!

The first glaring problem was my initial encounter with management/front desk staff. There is a sign on the door that explains that masks are required when entering the building. Well, the front desk person who also happens to be one of the hotel managers was not wearing a mask, did not disinfect their hands nor was there any type of protective shield at the front desk. One would think that a business that has people coming in from unknown locations would take the necessary precautions to protect themselves, their employees, and guests.

Around the corner from the front desk is the dining area. One of the amenities listed was breakfast. However, breakfast fell victim to the pandemic and the dining area was closed. There was no indication online that this would be the case nor did the desk manager tell me while checking in. There was a sign posted though.

In this same dining area, there was a fish tank however there were no fish and the tank made seen better days. I assume the fish got hit hard by the pandemic as well. If they weren't going to keep the tank clean, they should've at least drained it.

My room looked nice enough but upon closer inspection, it appeared to have not been cleaned properly. The shower doors had hard water stains and the vent in the ceiling had water stains around it.

As far as towels and washcloths, my room only had two towels and no washcloths.

The next thing to inspect was the bed. Hairs all over and stains on the sheets were not a good sign. Also, the pillows looked wrinkled and used as if they weren't even swapped out and the pillowcases were not changed after the previous guest.

This was just day one.

Day two didn't fare any better. My intention was to see if housekeeping would even show up. Housekeeping did, but to my dismay, they had only done one thing and that one thing they did wrong.

So prior to me leaving the morning of my second day, I balled up the sheets and left them in the middle of my bed. I also made sure to leave my bathroom door open with the light on and used the towels out to be seen. I had to use one towel as a bath rug.

Upon leaving, I did see housekeeping in the hallway. It was very peculiar that they had a basket of sheets, but no pillowcases, pillows, or blankets. I wanted to assume that they may keep those things in a closet somewhere and grab them when they need them, however, what happened when I returned later in the day disproved that assumption.

So, that balled-up mass of sheets and covers made its way back onto my bed. Housekeeping did change the sheets. It was apparent as soon as I walked into the room. First glance at the bed and I could see how wrinkled the covers and sheets were. When I pulled back the sheets there was hair like unexpected. The confirmation came when I saw the same stained sheet. What about the bathroom? Absolutely nothing was touched.

Pretty much things stayed the same the whole 4...

If you are thinking of a one night stay, the place is ok if you've got no choice, but don't try a second night. Spend the money elsewhere!

The rooms are clean but very small. You can hardly move around, but ok for a city hotel. Main issue here is the noise coming from the street and the hallway. It seems, that issues belonging to noise protection hadn't been addressed during the construction at all. Even if the windows are closed, it didn't change anything to the high noise level.

Breakfast is adequate and comparable to other hotels of this category. The staff also taking their bites... All fine, but the staff emptied the hot breakfast buffet for their own purpose, leaving paying guests empty trays. Nobody showed up to refill within 30 minutes.

Parking is valet only (29$ per day). Due to the location of the hotel at a crossroads, there's little space to pull cars up. So, there's a good chance of finding your car on the other side of the road, idling with keys inside, left alone by the valet guy, if you request your car.

Talking about the location: Close to the Inner Harbor, but that's the only positive thing to mention. The neighborhood is somewhat of run down (reminding me of a song sung by Elvis...). If you miss the turn to the hotel at the crossroads walking by foot, you'll find yourself walking between boozed or other suspicious looking people. This is definitely no place to stay with small children. Can't tell you how situation is during nighttime, because we simply weren't interested in getting out, after the things we experienced on daytime. But judging by the noise coming up from the street to our room (screams, people yelling at each other all night long, gunshots from somewhere close by not kidding), we're highly recommending to stay in the (relative) safety of the hotel room.

Talking about the staff: Polite, but only as long as you don't "bother" them with issues related to the hotel. Doing so, you will find yourself ending up in a pointless conversation with the general manager. The associates at the front desk are just focusing on things they have been told, without any ability or interest of thinking about solutions to the issue. (It's only a job...). A machine would do the same job for...