Aloft Columbus Easton — Hotel in Columbus

Staycation birthday weekend for the first week of May. This is a newly opened hotel across from Rh Restaurant and Pins at Easton! I booked the Savvy room for the four of us so we can have a bday party during covid. Booking online was simple but i really didnt like the fact that they didnt have pictures of Savvy room. I just had hoped itd be bigger than the regular double room. I was so busy this day i had forgotten to take pictures of the room. We got the top floor at one of the ends so we had a nice view of the side facing the empty lot across from Macys! There is a corner seatjng area with a table and the room is so spacious! Really like that there were a Marshalls speaker in the room and plenty of ports! The bathroom is huge and bathroom mirror was big and overall we were super satisfied with the space and layout. The room has a swivel smart tv so we could adjust the angle and stream. The beds were comfy and plenty of lights!

Here are the downsides::

I had requested when booking for four slippers and four sets of towels. My room did not have that set up nor does the hotel even offer slippers. It would have been nice for the hotel to notify us in advance or have it listed on the website somewhere so we couldve brought our own. They have a box to write out special requests but they dont look at it. They also give an option for early check in on the website but ... it doesnt do anything. You just have to call in the day of to see if its available or not. Thats what I did and the front desk said it was ready for early check in. We had just put our stuff down and headed out cuz its Easton. Didnt come back until after 10pm only to realize that the corner table floor was Super Sticky... as in when we stepped in that area with our socks on... the socks would stick to the floor. Doesnt feel like it was cleaned properly. Didnt realize until late so i didnt even know if we should switch rooms at that point.

The sheets are white and the fabric is the kind where if you wore a black sweater and had just layed down to rest the sheets have the fuzzy black residue on it now... so also beware of that.

The bathroom sliding door is weird. When you close... there is a hugeeee gap so if someone were to really take a look inside they can see you popping a squat on the toilet. The marshall speaker doesnt have directions so it took a while to know how to connect via bluetooth. The bathroom plugs was sooo weird... it would lock? We had to keep pressing reset/test for us to plug in our straightener.

Overall, i feel like i forked over a good chunk of money for a spacious room but it couldve been a lotttttttt better. The hotel itself is pretty and all but still i spend most of the time in the hotel and it sucked that the experience made me question if they really clean the rooms thoroughly especially...

Scheduled a retreat for an Ohio nonprofit. Scheduled it months in advance when OH COVID cases were 240 a day. 16 days before the event, cases were 6500 /day. Hotel’s largest conf room was not big enough for social distancing. We asked if we could postpone until it was safer. No. Not only that, but we had to pay the full cost for all the rooms (-$2400) and for the food. Hotel said it was too late to cancel the food or the rooms. Again, this was 16 days in advance. Charged us for the food which was another $2400. Assuming they actually couldn’t cancel the food, then I understand having to pay for it: we ended up donating the food to charity. But I cannot understand making us pay for the rooms. I asked them to just postpone the event and that we would come as soon as it was safer. There answer was no. I checked room availability prior to cancelling the rooms and there were many, many rooms available. So, blocking off 12 rooms did not cause them to lose money. In the age of Covid and the fact the hotel didn’t have a room big enough to maintain social distancing and we had elderly people attending, I think they could have let us postpone the rooms until it was safer. They could have kept the money and credited us for it if we came back when it was safer and keep it if we didn’t. Nope. The hotel even charged us a $90 gratuity for the food! Can’t make this stuff up. So this hotel charged a nonprofit close to $5,000 for an event we never had. In addition, they maintain how important safety is to them, but they don’t care enough that they don’t have the facilities to maintain social distancing and the only choice they gave us was to do something that was unsafe or pay $5.000. Poor, poor, poor customer service. Our company travels a lot. Once I relayed this story to the person who schedules the travel, she said we will never stay at an Aloft and Marriott will always be the last place we choose. They are a penny smart and a pound foolish. But here is a tip, if possible don’t block off rooms. If our 12 people had reserved their rooms individually and not tied to a block of rooms, all 12 could have cancelled and all our money would have been refunded. And just for the record, we didn’t get a deal on the block of rooms unless you count that they were $1.00 cheaper than when I tried to schedule a room prior to us cancelling. I’m sure there are policies that govern these things which is why they wouldn’t let us postpone. I wonder if when the policies were written, did they take into consideration a...

I requested a late checkout when I booked the room. When I arrived and checked in, I asked to confirm a late checkout for the next day. The front desk employee said yes, they could accommodate the late checkout and asked what time I preferred. She even asked another employee to come to the desk and help her with the request. They said it was available and gave us our keys. The room was fine, but the shower toiletries were empty. The next day when we came back to the hotel around 11:30 am (normal checkout is 12 pm), our hotel keys were not working. I went to the front desk and was given a new set of keys. The new set of keys also did not work, so a cleaning staff member ended up giving us entry to our room. I called the front desk to ask about the keys. I mentioned that we had confirmed a late checkout time the night before and were still in need of working keys. The employee seemed surprised and said that the late checkout “was a request, not a guarantee” and said that she would have to confirm with her manager if they were even able to offer it. I replied that my request WAS guaranteed when I confirmed it at check-in the night before. The employee said she would bring me a new set of working keys and call me back ASAP after talking to her manager. I waited about 30 minutes for a call back and I was then told that they were unable to accommodate a late checkout because 1.) the employee working the night before was new and must not have entered a late checkout the right way and 2.) “plus, you’re not even a member”. At that point I still didn’t have working keys and couldn’t access any of the facilities we needed anyway, so we left. The employees at check-in were friendly and polite, but all-around, there was poor communication and management. Maybe you’ll have better luck if...