Aloft Waco Downtown — Hotel in Waco

TL;DR Very dirty rooms with poor build quality. Loud AC with even louder generator on the north face of the hotel that makes sleeping without earplugs difficult. Well managed with a GM that reached out to learn more about the situation and try to make things as right as they can be.

EDIT: The GM of Aloft Waco, Rich, reached out to me to apologize for the circumstances surrounding my stay. I appreciated the consideration and, though I couldn’t get a new room with the hotel being fully booked, he assured me that the room and hallways would be cleaned and repaired for the next guests. I’d be open to staying here again in the future because of Rich’s kindness and consideration.

This original review is fairly scathing. I'm not usually one to spend my time writing poor reviews but my stay at Aloft was rough I’m keeping it here for posterity.

I travel to Waco fairly often for work and this is the first and last I will stay at Aloft Waco. I was in room 400 on the north face of the hotel. When I first arrived, the woman at the front desk, Tiffany I believe, was very kind and helpful in getting me checked in.

Upon exiting the elevator I was immediately aware of the quality of the hotel by the numerous scuffs and chips on the walls of my floor. The carpet is crunchy and reminded me of college dorm floors more than a Marriott hotel. There were seams showing between cut patches of carpet and the rubber trim on the wall bowed out from adhesive failure. Entering my room, I found a similar spattering of scuffs, dents, and chips all across my wall. This spread into the main sleeping area, the window sills, the dressers, the fake wood trim on the ceiling the drawers in the bathroom, and across the shower floor. The carpet has many stains on it and is crunchy when walked on. It feels very dirty and I've kept my shoes on most of the time to avoid having to touch it. Many of the walls, in addition to the previously mentioned wear, have mysterious stains and splatters on them. Though I don't know what the stuff on the walls is, it looks like snot or food. The more I looked, the more gross small details I found. In short, the room feels dirty and, plainly, gross to be inside. I've attached pictures of the most egregious issues I saw.

The bathroom also suffers from mysterious splatters and lots of dark scuffs on the shower floor. The sealing in the shower is covered in a maroon mildew in the cracks as well. I wish I had brought shower shoes to wear in here.

I will mention, I inspected the bed closely and didn't find any signs of dirty treatment. It's your run of the mill hotel bed. It would have been nice to sleep on if the room was quiet... which it was not. The AC seems to be struggling to keep up and so there's a constant ambient fan loudly blowing to try and keep the room below 75F. Just outside the window of all the north facing hotel rooms is an industrial generator that turns on and off every 5 minutes. It turns on, runs for 5 minutes, turns off for 5 minutes, and the cycle repeats. The sound dampening in the room is non-existent and lent itself to a restless first night.

I called the Aloft front desk the next morning and inquired about swapping to a new room. During the call, I began to explain that I was having issues with my room and wanted to swap if possible. Before I could finish my sentence, the front desk attendant interrupted me to say that "we are fully booked so there's no way to swap your room." Sure, yes, that happens and it's fine. I suspect I was visiting during the start of the fall semester at Baylor. So that I can forgive since the hotel was abnormally busy. But the lack of courtesy to inquire about my issues or why I wanted to switch was very frustrating. I asked to be put on a waitlist if any rooms opened up and didn’t hear back due to the previously mentioned...

We stayed at this hotel April 7 and 8 (for the eclipse).||Bottom Line||It’s a nice facility – but the management is either incompetent and/or disdainful. If you raise an issue, they will tell any story, make any excuse or say whatever they think will get you to go away. Their mantra seems to be never apologize. I felt disrespected during my entire stay.||The Facility||Aloft is one of Marriott’s brands supposedly designed for the “traveler of the future”. It features contemporary rooms with a modernistic design. We found the room to be clean and simple. Perhaps a little smaller than usual, but functional with clean lines. So, we have a nicely built property.||Problems with Management||As to the management – well better to call it the mismanagement. We arrived at the hotel with a group – perhaps 150 of us. The desk had one employee, so they had to check in everyone one at a time. We all had to stand in line outside, in the heat for more than an hour. Considering the fact that they knew that it was a group arriving, they either should have had more staff, or perhaps pre-arranged check-in.||Did they even apologize for the delay – NOPE.||So, after we check in, we decide that we want to go out (to the Dr Pepper museum) – there’s a van outside, so we ask what are its hours and are told NO VAN ON SUNDAY – ok, fair enough. We call an UBER, and as we’re waiting for it to arrive, we see the van driver coming out with other customers – I guess they meant no van for us.||The next day, after a day touring (went out to watch the eclipse), we decide to go to the bar for a drink. We’re told at the desk the computer’s down – no bar today. Fair enough. However, there is a van (sorta). The van driver takes us to a restaurant—all is good. But then we call for a pick up and are told that the van is out, it will be 10 or 15 minutes. Fair enough. We wait 20 minutes, in a light rain, and call again – the front desk tells us that that they don’t know why the van hasn’t arrived, it left 10 minutes ago. We wait another 15 minutes. We’re told – they don’t know why the van didn’t arrive, it left 5 minutes ago. (Wait a minute we thought it had left a long time ago). We wait another 10 minutes – no one answers the phone at the phone desk. Ten more minutes, we get through to the front desk, and apparently no one actually told the van driver to pick us up. But to be fair (enough) we were told that there were lots of pick ups and they were very busy. Now, if they had just told us in the first place that there were a lot of pick-ups, that they were busy, and it would be a while, we’d have been fine. We could have called an UBER or even walked. But no – they just told us that it’s coming – when it wasn’t, and the van driver hadn’t even been told to pick us up.||When we got back, did they even apologize for the delay – NOPE.||Now, I’ll be frank. Anyone can screw up – and with me, trying to make it right or some gesture goes a long way. If the hotel manager had taken responsibility, tried to make it right or even just apologized, I probably wouldn’t have written the review. ||The Rating||Based on the facility -- I’d have given it 4. It was ok, and if you buy into the concept, maybe even 5. I’m deducting 2* for their disrespect during the screw ups. So, the overall rating is 2*, which under the circumstances, I think is charitable on my part.||I CANNOT recommend this hotel.||I would love a response from Marriott’s management about...

I will start by saying I generally do not leave negative reviews on Trip Advisor. I use it for accolades and to support businesses that impress me. If I have an experience I'm not impressed with I generally say nothing because I know people/places can have a bad day but this weekend at Aloft was ridiculous. When you have to go to CVS and buy your own toilet paper, it's worth a post. We go to Waco often for University events and have stayed several different places. We booked this trip late on a very busy weekend in Waco and Aloft was the only thing available so we thought we'd give it a try. We arrived late on a Thursday night- the room was clean-ish, not thrilled but basically said "it'll be fine". Friday morning as we were heading out we confirmed we were signed up for housekeeping and mentioned we wanted to be sure because we needed dry towels, and our room only had one roll of toilet paper. They confirmed. We arrived back around 3:00pm and our room was not cleaned. We went downstairs to confirm we were still on the list as we needed to get ready for a dinner reservation. Shortly after, we saw housekeeping on our floor. We peeked out the door several times and saw them working their way down towards our room. We were slightly annoyed since we had requested service in the morning and were now getting crunched for time to shower and get ready but remained patient. A few minutes before 5:00pm we opened the door again and housekeeping was no where on our floor. Guessing the clock struck 5:00 and they left. My husband went downstairs, told them we were unhappy we didn't receive housekeeping and asked for towels and toilet paper. They handed him a few random towels and said they would try to find toilet paper to bring to our room. Never happened. The next morning we stopped at the desk on our way out at 8:30am and said we did not get housekeeping yesterday, we would like it done this morning. We will be back a little after lunch and will need the room to get ready for an event that evening. So please clean our room and give us toilet paper this morning. We arrived back at the hotel at 2:30pm and our room had not been cleaned. We went to the front desk again and said we needed it cleaned and do not want a repeat of the day before where they leave without getting to our room. We said we would leave for a bit and be back. While we were out we decided to pick up a pack of toilet paper just in case the same thing happened again. We returned an hour later and they had been in our room- they happily took the $5 tip off the bed. They sort of straightened the comforter. They left some towels. They did not clean the sink, counter, mirror, faucet, toilet, or shower. The faucet still had finger smudges and water spots all over, the sink still had remnants of the coffee that had been poured out. AND- no toilet paper. Thank goodness we bought our own! |As for some of the other negative reviews I read- I can confirm the bar was never open while we were there, and it's not in the best spot in Waco. Waco is kind of like that- hit and miss- but there are definitely better options. Again, I'm not a complainer and pretty forgiving of people just doing their best but this was ridiculous. I will say the front desk staff was very nice and apologized repeatedly. We felt sorry for them. They were clearly trying to do their best but it doesn't seem they have anyone there to...