Sandcastle Inn & Motel — Hotel in Old Orchard Beach

On July 23 I reserved and paid for a room, arriving Sept 20 and staying for one night. At 3:50 pm I arrived on a bicycle after having ridden from Brunswick, ME, and found the office to be locked. A sign on the counter, visible through the sliding-glass door of the office, said "Be right back" and gave a phone number. I called the number and it went to voice mail, and I left a message that said (in essence), "I'm here, please let me in." I waited for 20-25 minutes and then figured I'd better start looking for another motel in town. I found one, booked it online, and then left Sandcastle 30 minutes after I'd arrived. I saw no sign of life during my 30-minute stay outside the office. ||||I left several messages for Randy to call me to discuss this, and he finally returned my call at about 11:00 am on Sept 24, after I'd returned to Boston. He asked what I wanted, I said "Well, I'd like a refund," and he said "Well, that's not gonna happen." We talked for about 15 minutes, by which I mean that I talked for 1 minute and Randy talked for 14 minutes. He did this without knowing any of the facts about my particular case because he kept interrupting me when I began to tell them to him. ||||Here's what I learned from Randy: 1) He doesn't believe I was there; 2) He's used this check-in procedure (whatever "this" means, he didn't say) for 5 years and it's "infallible," they've never had even one complaint; 3) He was there in the office when I arrived (which he told me quite matter-of-factly before asking me what day I'd arrived); 4) If he wasn't there, all I had to do was pick up the phone and call the number on the motel sign, and he'd have been there "in a second and a half" to let me in; 5) Check-in procedures for "late arrivals" are described in the motel information they send, so if I get there late and can't get in then it's my own fault (I asked him to define "late" and he faltered and said "it depends" before quickly starting to filibuster about some other aspect of my incompetence as a customer; 6) I shouldn't be quibbling so much about $77.50; and 7) I was starting to piss him off and he didn't have time to continue this, so he ended the conversation (although to his credit he didn't end it rudely by hanging up on me, he did it pretty diplomatically). There's more, but you get the gist. ||||It appears from other reviews that some people love Randy and think the Sandcastle is a charming place. Others, not so much. You'll have to judge for yourself the odds of you landing in the former camp. I've stayed at a lot of hotels and motels and I've never seen anything even remotely like this---the whole experience has...

We booked a stay here for the night of September 28 for two rooms. We made the reservation in January. In April, we were contacted by Sun Stays. They said they had purchased this property, and we needed to pay for our reservation. When booking this room through Expedia, somehow the payment option was missed. No problem. We paid for our two rooms on May 1. The charges are on my credit card. When we arrived on September 28 later in the evening, we found that we had to call a phone number to get our room codes. The phone number was Sun Stays. They did not have our reservation. The lady at Sun Stays kept putting us on hold while she tried to see what happened. After an hour of standing in the parking lot in the dark and the cold, still nothing. We told them to cancel the rooms, and we drove around Orchard Beach for another hour trying to find two rooms. Today is October 20. We still have not received our refund for the rooms. We cannot reach a person who works for Sun Stays no matter what time of day it is. We have left messages with their answering service and still no return phone calls. I wish I could say this is a great little place to stay, but once the owners sold it to a management company, the customer service is gone. Don't stay any place that is run by Sun Stays. I continue to try to call to no avail. I cannot find them on Google to leave a review, so I am forced to do that here, which is a property that they manage. Oh, and to top it all off, they tried to charge our credit card again on October 1! Thankfully someone on their end entered the expiration date incorrectly and my credit card declined the payment. If I cannot get a refund, my credit card company said they will step in and tag the charge as fraud. Bad customer service, Sun Stays. Or are you a scam? Because talking to someone who actually works for Sun Stays is...

The Sandcastle Inn & Motel|||We booked our stay at the Sandcastle Inn & Motel in October and paid for 2 nights, checking in on 10/1 and checking out on 10/3.|||The afternoon on which we arrived we parked in the only available spot in the parking lot.|||Attached to a chain link fence was a sign directing us to the office. I opened the gate and followed the path to a door that I thought was the office. I cautiously opened the door and entered a room that reeked of stale cigarettes and an ashtray filled to overflowing with cigarette butts.|||On a cluttered desk were what appeared to be reservations. I called out a greeting and soon Randy emerged from another room.|||After checking in Randy moved his car, opening a parking place in front of our room.|||As we settled in, we couldn’t help but notice that the room was filthy. Some of the furniture was wicker and we noticed human hair protruding from the wicker. We spent the night, but first thing in the morning on 10/2, well before checkout time, we packed and left.|||We left the key on the counter because there was no one in the office. On our way to another hotel, we called twice and left messages, alerting Randy to the fact that we left because of the condition of the room and had requested a refund for one night.|||Returning home from our trip we called Randy to again ask for a refund.|||He maintained that he did not have time to prepare the room for other guests, but that he would ask his wife for advice and return the call. He never did.|||We’re giving it one star because the room...