SureStay Plus by Best Western Brandywine Valley — Hotel in Wilmington

Be sure to look at pictures! I have stayed in MANY hotels (and motels) throughout my life, but I've never left one in the middle of the night as I did for this property.

I arrived early for check in (at 2pm instead of 3pm) but the staff was able to get me to a room by 2:45pm. Was told that the room I had booked (through Expedia - a "business queen" with high speed internet, said my receipt with photo included below) was really a "corner queen" and as a result didn't get great WiFi. Since I seemed to be the first guest checking in for the night, I asked if any other rooms were available but the answer was "not without incurring an additional $30 charge." So I didn't change. I stayed in the lobby to continue to use WiFi there, so that 15 min of earlier check-in wasn't useful in any way.

See photo of actual room. Not even remotely like the photos provided on Expedia. There's also an "accessible queen" option on Expedia which has similar style wallpaper (in red) but this was not that room - up a flight of stairs with no elevator and without the walk-in shower of an accessible room. Sheets appeared clean, but I didn't think to check for bugs. Only one complete set of towels (and bath towel was quite small - something larger than the floor/bath mat). No other extra linen to use at pool. Everything dripped or sounded like dripping: fridge, sink, shower. Luckily not raining because it looks like the ceiling also drips (see photo from above bed) - I was on the second/top floor. Stains on most other surfaces in the room: chairs, walls, lampshades. Floor felt gritty, so kept my flip flops on. No drain cover in the bathroom sink - careful not to drop your toothbrush or the drain-opening-sized shampoo/conditioner down the plumbing!

Standard $100 deposit requested at check-in, except a few hours later I received notifications of three fraudulent charges (totalling $900) that had been attempted on my card between check-in and midnight that night. This is the first time I've ever had such an issue with this card, and luckily Capital One's fraud department was available 24/7 to help dispute and cancel my card (this property lists 24/7 front desk, which is also not accurate). The hold on my card from this property was the ONLY out-of-the-ordinary charge I had made in 2 months and I was still in possession of my physical card, so this is pretty suspect.

I booked a "hotel" for this overnight because I was traveling solo and thought it would be safer than an AirBnb, but with a dark parking lot far from the guest entrance, propped doors that should've only been able to open with guest keys, and dark exterior walkways, nothing about this booking felt safe. With motel-style design (no interior hallways) and everything concrete for exposure to outside, you can hear every door opening and closing all night (or at least until 2:30 AM when I found another place to stay and left my key card in the lobby drop box). Spotty WiFi during the day became nonexistent in the evening.

I had planned to relax in the morning at the pool before check out, but dingy looking pool was not appealing (main pool looked better than attached photos during the day, but I believe these are either the kiddie pools or the jetted tubs?).

Not sure what merits a 3-star rating at this property. I'm used to staying at 1- and 2- star properties abroad which might as well be the Ritz Carlton compared to this place in cleanliness alone. I'm not picky about bed or pillow firmness, but as I tried to sleep in this room I realized I've camped outside in a tent with more feeling of security, comfort, and cleanliness than I did here. I've also stayed at quite a few Best Westerns around the USA, and this one was especially bad...

Rating on a scale of 1-10. Ten being the highest - this would be a 2. And I've stayed at a LOT of hotels across the US and around the world. Unfortunately, this was the only place that "looked" decent and had an ok review. Makes me wonder who rated this a 6.0 on Hotels.com.||Let's see....to start the front desk staff seemed ambivalent to customers. She saw me standing there waiting to check in....ignored me and kept carrying on her conversation with someone unseen for several minutes. And zero cordiality when she did approach. But she was adamant about not parking along the fence line... across from the front desk because I might get towed. Ok fine. Odd, but thanks for the warning I guess. ||Overall grounds needs a good week-long cleaning. They don't even bother with the basics like sweeping. ||Room was ok. Though it seemed the cleaning was basic. The fridge in the room ran all night and made it hard to sleep. My son also noted that the walls were paper thin and heard the next door neighbors opening and slamming their door to 2 am. (So we were sure to return the favor when we left at 7 am). The pool was ok. Non heated, but ok. The bathtub dated back to the 1960s when people were much smaller and not 6' and 200#.||The hot tub was disgusting and you could see the mold and algae being pumped around. Even other guests were commenting on it. And the kiddie pool has green algae growing on the filter at the bottom. Both ice machines weren't working (we asked). Basically it was - oh well, too bad. ||We spoke with other people hanging pool side, and they said the same thing - only booked because I was the only thing that looked ok for kids -- but wouldn't again.||And charging $158 a night is a joke. ||This is supposed to be a Wyndham property?? If I were them, I'd pull my brand name off this property. What an embarrassment. Overall grungy area, and sketchy people in the parking lot at odd hours. I was actually grateful when I checked my truck on Sat morning that it wasn’t vandalized or broken into. In the am I was just glad to be leaving as I turned in my keys (one of which only worked on the exterior door and not the room).||Parking: Free, but don’t park near the fence, or you may get towed.|Customer service: Meh|Cleanliness: The rooms were ok. The overall grounds were not|Amenities: Breakast – but only starts at 7:30.|Pool: Average motel pool.|Hot tub: Disgusting|Kiddie pool: Gross|Ice Machines: both broken||Would recommend: No|Would...

We traveled here from another state, it was the only place that had rooms available and it was an emergency type of situation. On our way there I noticed that they attempted to charge my card despite the facts that I told them TWICE over the phone that I was going to pay cash and they stated that it was ok, so I called them to let them know that we were on our way and they said it was ok. When we got there the lady at the front desk was talking to another guest telling them that they couldn’t smoke in the room but if the wanted they could go across the street and smoke and then call her so she can have a couple of puffs (that should’ve been my first red flag but like I said I had no choice) when it was finally our turn she stated we didn’t have a reservation (let’s not forget that they had already tried to charge my card) so she “made something happen” and gave us a room, we left because we were late to where we had to go and when we came back it was the worst experience ever. The door was extremely hard to open and the room was disgustingly dirty, it smelled SO BAD I threw up. We tried going to front desk but the doors were locked so we went and got our own cleaning supplies and despite the fact that we cleaned everything we could and mopped so many times the room still smelled disgusting. We decided to go back to front desk and they had a paper with a phone number so we called, the finally opened the door and we told front desk that the room was disgust And he said there was nothing he could do, we asked him to atleta give us new sheets since the ones that were on the bed smelled MUSTY and looked slept on and had blood on them he told us that they didn’t have any spare sheets. We had to go back and buy sheets to be able to sleep on that bed. We spent most of the night calling other hotels to see if they had rooms available but unfortunately they were all booked so we had no choice but to stay there. We asked to cancel and they stated they still had to charge the stay because “there was nothing he could do”. It was, without a doubt the WORST HOTEL IVE EVER BEEN TO. It was disgusting, never again. Everything was broken and smelled like mold. It was dusty. Horrible place to stay. I added pictures of some of the cleaning supplies we had to buy and also the major damages...