Orange Lake Resort — Hotel in Four Corners

We just left our stay at orange lake resort. This was our second time here as we purchased a latitudes package from the first stay. We were interested in buying a timeshare, but after the start of this stay we reconsidered the night before our tour as a no.

We did a 20 hr road trip which we tried to time right. we ended up arriving 4 hrs early to check-in. We were exhausted from driving through the night. The receptionist would not accommodate early check-in. She said our villa would be ready by 4pm (standard) & was getting cleaned. It “may” be ready early and would get a phone call. We waited 3.5 hrs and called the front desk for an update. The lady was rude. We asked if there was a timeframe because we were exhausted. She snapped at us and sternly stated “early check in is not guaranteed.” She practically hung the phone up on us… then 4:15 pm comes around. Still no call. We drove back to the front desk and got a guy who helped us. Explained our situation and he was the first one to apologize and claim they are in a slower season and they could have switched our room hours ago…. (Great to know!)

He switched our villa since the other one was still not ready. We get into our villa at 4:45pm. Then we try to shower… only running lukewarm/cold water. Call the front desk and they’re going to send a tech “immediately.” We wait over 1.5 hours for a tech to come out. Tech tells us we need to first run hot water through kitchen sink, then bathroom sink and then shower to get hot water… WHAT?! Whatever - We finally shower closer to 7pm. We are tired and hungry. This is when we decided no way we are buying a timeshare with this company. Disastrous start of the trip and horrible customer service. The front desk is the face of your company. How does your staff treat your guests outside of the tours? The two ladies we first spoke to answered that question.

We have to go through time share presentation because it’s part of the package. The next morning we meet sales rep Oswaldo, who we told from the start we will do the 1.5 hrs but decided we will not be getting a timeshare. Of course they continue to sell you. He left us several times throughout the tour. First we looked for him for over 5-min after the video. Nowhere to be found. Finally find him & he sits us at a table, goes over another leg of their sales pitch. He leaves us with a booklet saying he will “be right back.” Left us for 15 minutes! But we keep moving through… Then we get to the end, he calls the manager and they do their sales pitch. We say no. This is already well over 2 hrs. Oswaldos personality completely changes (rude) & says he will be right back to check us out and get the final paperwork to get our reward for going through the presentation. He leaves and we wait over 30 min. We start looking everywhere for him. Even try to check out (which you cannot without paperwork.) We eventually walked into the offices in the front and guess what? Turns out he left us & started a new tour. Never intended to come back. We were at the sales pitch for almost 3 hours!

Horrible experience. Manager came out, who is pleasant and apologized/excused Oswaldo’s behavior - that there was a misunderstanding. (Not the case). Oswaldo meant to leave us at the presentation. He never shook our hands, thanked us for our time, told us to enjoy the rest of the stay. We know for fact he said he would be right back. Is this how you’re treated when you decide to not get a time share? This confirmed our decision on passing up purchasing.

Get new people at the front - create higher standards of professionalism and customer service. Set rules to your sales pitch & professionalism when a customer declines. If i ever treated my business customers the way my husband and i were treated by staff at this place, we would be out of a job. I will say the people at the pool & restaurants were phenomenal. Pool is great. But the front desk is your customers first experience at the resort. It should be pleasant. If it’s not, why would people want to invest money into a timeshare - or...

This really depends on where you stay on the sprawling property but all of the units, imo, are dated....some more than others. Textured walls in the presidential suite w/textured ceiling vs very textured walls painted over 40 years with popcorn ceilings in the villas. If you're in the west village and you paid over 350 for idc how many nights...just know you've paid too much for a resort stay in Orlando. I was extremely disappointed with just how dated and dirty the units are. The worst "resort" experience I've ever had. With that being said, the west village "villas" are spacious since they were built in 1982 so there is good bedroom & living spaces. Bathrooms are adequate while I'd say the master bathroom is small. Unit was quite dark with mostly lamps to light it up, stains on furniture and both carpeted and tiled floor, rust inside the refrigerator, old ac units that rev up when coming on, light switches that don't work, bedside lights that don't work, some outlets that don't work, curtain pulls broken off, etc. Patios without railing so if you're on the first floor like I was, anyone can walk up to your patio. A man with no shirt walked over on our last night trying to find a way through the shrubs in front of our patio so...that was fun. Also the patio is all cracked up concrete with weeds growing through the cracks. Location was not as close to Disney as I thought it would be. 45 mins to 1hr away from the airport depending on traffic. I highly recommend using the West Village entrance when arriving for check in as it's easier to get to. We arrived at the main entrance I guess and it took us awhile to find the registering building. West Villas have regular residential trash bins beside the building which means there are feisty raccoons out at night. I was told by a sales associate that "that's just Florida" but I've stayed at many resorts in Orlando and have never had this problem. Also, the west village units are like apartments so you don't get a trolley cart to help unload and load your car. If you're on the second floor, there is no elevator, just stairs. I wanted to try Holiday Inn Resorts to dip my foot into possibly owning a timeshare with them and as I'd never stayed with one of their properties, I was excited to see what they would offer. Needless to say, I was beyond disappointed and even though I stayed in the marketing area (West Village) I wasn't impressed with the newer updated parts of this resort. I expected better. 50% of the pool umbrellas were dark and dingy looking, we had to pay $9 per person for putt putt at the resort but the putt putt course was very poorly maintained i.e.e rips, dark splotches, stains. Just didn't feel like everything was being maintained properly especially if they're charging for amenities. I won't be back as there are too many hotels and resorts in the greater Orlando area with nicer accommodations for cheaper if you look for them. I video chatted with my mom to show her the state of the unit so in my mind I took more pics and videos than I actually did and I hate that. But trust me, there is no exaggeration about unit 4339 in the...

Be very very careful... I paid to stay here at the resort and were moved to the holiday inn a few days before we were to travel all because they were way booked up, as they put it they had a lot of there time share members staying at the resort. They get priority (however during the presentation we heard that the resort was not full at that time and they were not sure why we were at the hotel. They even offered to move us to the resort. But we were set to check out the next day.) So holiday inn put us into a single king bed room instead of the 2 room suite with an additional pull out bed in the couch that was to sleep 8. Humm... family of 5 and only 1 bed? This wasn't even close to the 2 room resort suite we we're promised and paid for. We talked to the hotel who agreed to put us in a 2 queen bed hotel room and my son had to sleep on the floor, they don't even have a rollaway. We did there 90min presintation that ended up being 4.5 hrs long not 90mins. They apologized and promised to make it up to us. We were told that we would receive a call where they would either move us to the resort or figure out some way to make it up to us. That never happened instead they offered us to stay for a whole week at the resort. Not bad until they tell you that you have to pay $1799.00. Hum... how is that going to make it up to us??? That was their offer to everyone who said they were not interested in the offer from the presentation not an offer to compensate for the issues that they said was "not how it was supposed to be". Why should we be paying to stay where they said we were going to be in the first place? Nope not feeling it. Then they offered to let us stay for 899.00 for 4 days 3 nights. Well that's what we were supposed to be getting in the first place.... All they did was try to sell us left and right but have done absolutely nothing to correct the issues... I wasn't happy with the way they were going about this. We had already paid over 350.00 and then when we checked out we had to pay an additional 137.00 to cover the taxes, resort fees, and parking fees and I still don't have my 20,000 points in my IHG PROGRAM that they promised. To be clear, it would have been better for us to just book a hotel like normal instead of looking at this. Tons of promises yet received nothing of value. So bottom line is we PAID for a two room resort stay at a slight discount if we were willing to sit through the presentation (which we were interested in but did not like how we had been treated). Instead we got a double bed hotel room (after we requested it at the hotel) at no discount that did not fit our family and had to waist our time sitting through a presentation where they promise to give you an amazing trip experiences through their program that cost quite a bit. I've seen how they take care of me and there is no way I would spend any money to be lied to and treated this way. I wouldn't put up with this if they were paying me to take the...