Baymont by Wyndham Helen — Hotel in Helen

I'm really boggled by all of the 5 star reviews. We chose this hotel because of all of the great reviews, but we never would have stayed here if we knew what was in store for us- especially at this price. We stayed here for a one night getaway in Helen about a month ago. Upon arrival, the room already looked dirty. We had a lower balcony room in the very rear of the building, and I guess they forget about cleaning those. From the front door, we immediately noticed dirty hand prints all over the door and window leading to the balcony, which was also very dirty and covered in spider/cobwebs. Not exactly a place I'd like to relax, even though we paid more for the balcony room. The beds were made up when we arrived, but based on prior experience with dirty sheets in a new room, I pulled back the comforter to inspect and discovered several hairs on the sheets. I immediately went to the front desk and asked for new sheets- that we placed on the beds ourselves. My very elderly grandmother said that it was the first time she had ever changed her own sheets on vacation. As if dirty sheets weren't enough, the TV was also broken (it consistently fuzzed out every 4 seconds or so), so we weren't able to relax in the room and watch television either. We had booked the room with 4 people, but there were only 3 body towels. And the box on the wall that holds the tissue box completely dismantled when we tried to pull out a tissue.

After our experience here, we would absolutely not recommend this hotel to someone looking for a clean, mid-range hotel experience. Our experience was much more on level with a motel. I understand that several other people had a good experience, but perhaps they weren't in a neglected balcony room. The windows did look cleaner in the main rooms on our walk to the lobby. However, considering the balcony rooms cost more, I would think that they would pay special attention to those rooms? I guess not.

I raised all of these concerns with the hotel staff at the end of my visit. The front desk assured us that the manager would credit us a portion of our bill because of our terrible experience. She mentioned that we should call the manager if we hadn't seen the credit in a week or so. I didn't see a credit when we returned, so I called the manager. He didn't know about our experience at all and asked me to relay all of our complaints again. After explaining everything again, he said that he needed to speak with his boss, and that his boss would give me a call the following week. I never received a call... or a credit for that matter.

The only good thing I can say about this hotel is that the front desk staff was very polite. The lady who was at the desk when I had to ask for new sheets was very apologetic about our dirty sheets. However, the hotel overall could use some work on communication, as our complaints were never relayed to the manager. I also hope housekeeping has gone through more training since our visit!

Edit after manager's reply Thank you for reminding me about the wifi, which also did not work at all in our room. When I brought this up to the staff, they recommended using it in the lobby. This wasn't the reply I was hoping for, considering I paid for a room with wifi. In addition, the parking lot was almost empty. There were 2 cars in the lot, including ours. The hotel definitely was not even close to full capacity.

I understand that mistakes can occur, however with the amount of "mistakes" we encountered, which included failure to do one's job, I would have expected the staff to take my complaints more seriously and actually reach out- at the very least, to apologize. Instead, the manager completely ignored his own staff's request for me to contact him about a credit back on my bill and waited for this bad review to extend his apologies. I didn't ask for a credit. I was offered one. I would say it's pretty bad business to offer a credit, then ignore the customer when they take the time to inquire about it. Thank you for your offer, but I will not be...

Personally I would not recommend this hotel based on the experience I went through. Upon arrival at the hotel, I provided my reservation info to the front desk clerk, who after looking for about 10 minutes could not find my reservation in their system. My reservation was under a 3rd party so I contacted them to let them know what was going on. Moments later, before the 3rd party could reach the hotel clerk, my reservation paperwork was found in the CHECKED-IN bucket....interesting because if the paperwork was found in the wrong bucket, why was the confirmation information not found when looked up in the system? The printout had to come up from somewhere right? While the clerk attempted to make sense of how that all happened, I decided not to make a big deal about it and gave them the benefit of the doubt that it was a simple mistake and at this point I was ready to be checked in after a 4 hour drive. As the clerk is completing my check-in I noticed a small cockroach roaming the counter behind the clerk. At this point I'm looking at it and asking myself questions like should I even continue with this reservation, this was clearly a red flag. Reservation check in was complete before I could say anything and keys for the room were being made but I still had this bad feeling in my stomach about this whole ordeal. Made my way to the room and as I was doing so, the condition of the hotel was definitely NOT UP TO PAR especially with what I was paying for my stay. The pictures all over the internet for this hotel clearly did NOT match the condition of the hotel. Got into the room and as I walked in there was that musty cigarette smell that was obviously covered up with a ton of air freshener; another red flag. Did a walk thru of the room, and some of the pillow cases on the pillow had stains and were yellowish/tan when they were supposed to be white. Walked to the bathroom and noticed a huge crack across the wall (pictures attached) and it was at this point I had no choice but to contact the 3rd party and ask if they could cancel my reservation. It wasn't the easiest process but 45 minutes later the reservation was canceled, refunded, and I moved to a MUCH better hotel down the street. Fast forward to 3 days after all that happened, I got a $350 charge from the hotel on my card, which shouldn't have occurred because everything was canceled via my 3rd party and at this point I had even got my refund from the 3rd party. Contacted the hotel, which took me multiple tries in the course of the day to get a hold of the manager. After getting a hold of the manager some 7 hours later the manager apologized for the experience and stated I would get a refund in 3-5 days. Asked the manager why I was charged but did not provide a reason and only said that I should get my refund in 3-5 days. Well, that's reassuring. It is now the 5th day and I have YET to get my refund. I have now had to involve my bank on a dispute of this charge and contacted the 3rd party to follow up on this matter. I have also contacted the hotel AGAIN and I was told a manager should be getting back to me. It's been 5 hours since that call and nothing yet! Update coming soon…

Note: This was my experience hence my rating and review. DYR but personally I’d not...

Traveler beware! Aggressively woken up at 4am…police called. I don’t normally leave reviews, but people need to know what they are getting into here. When we arrived the door wasn’t shut all the way, and the furniture was rearranged. One thing that stuck out was the chair was facing the window. It smelled dirty like mold. The bathroom was the worst thing about it. I went down to complain, and they were booked up completely so they offered a refund. I told the lady at the front desk that my son was there with the youth on a trip so that wouldn’t help, and that I didn’t want one, but I would be leaving a review. They should have offered to clean the bathroom at least, but nothing was offered. I heard the lady tell the manager on the phone that no we didn’t want a refund, and that we would leave a review. We stayed in room 222, and I am writing this at 5am in the morning, because the manager of the hotel tried to bust in the room at 4am. I jumped from the bed to close the door, and he started yelling that I needed to get out, and that the room was refunded. I tried to explain to him we did not ask for refund. He started then yelling at me to get out even more aggressively, and there was no way we were walking out, and seeing so much stuff on the news we didn’t know who this guy was. He starts telling me he has me recorded saying I wanted to get the hell out of there, and wanted a refund. We were down with our church that was in the lobby at the time eating pizza, and was not yelling or going crazy on anyone. I told my husband to call the police, and then proceeded to get dressed. The police we arrived, and there was no apology for anything just a safe escort off the property. The officer of Helen was nice, and just had to do his job. our room was filthy, there were bugs in the bathroom coming from the carpet into the tile. Sheets had weird looking stains on them. The bathtub was disgusting, and toilet was peeling and unsightly but at least appeared to be clean. My husband nor I had brought sandals so we didn’t get a shower. The ceiling is falling apart. There was dust in every corner on every piece of furniture. Everything was dusty. Even parts of the carpets had layers of dust on them. This place looked nothing like the pictures, and it was a king looked nice on the website very misleading. I would of taken more pictures if I would of known what was going to happen. We weren’t expecting the ritz, but this was too much. Moral of the story don’t complain if you stay there you will not know if your the next to be wakened and scared out...