Hygiene & safety concern; Intimidation, rude and confrontational behaviour by staff; very stressful experience for a woman travelling solo.
I paid for four nights at Freehand New York. I made a reasonable hygiene request. What I received was dismissal, sustained intimidation, an implied physical threat, obstruction of a legitimate complaints process, and threat of removal from the premises in the middle of the night — twice. No woman travelling alone should experience this. No guest of any kind should experience this. The full context - At the end of a really long, tiring day of business meetings, I returned to my room after dinner, and found a medium sized bug on my bed. The room was not the cleanest, and the sheets were torn in a place - this I had ignored for 4 days. But I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in a bed with insect(s?) in it. I made a simple, reasonable request: please change my sheets. What followed was one of the most distressing experiences I have ever had as a hotel guest. This is the not so worrisome part - First, a member of staff came and handed me the sheets and asked me to do it myself. When requested that someone help me with it, two staff members arrived. Rather than addressing a straightforward hygiene failure, i.e., changing the sheets, one spent several minutes deflecting with irrelevant & condescending remarks - "this is New York," "I tell my daughter that the bug is more scared of you". I continue to repeat my request. Then he finds a bug on the wall, his colleague kills it, and he tries to convince me that's the one. Well how can I know for sure. I continue to state that this is irrelevant and the ask is to change the sheets . By this time, he has started speaking over me. Here's where it really got stressful - Now having still not changed the sheets, he asks for me to pack my bags and leave. On a game week in NYC and with the FIFA world cup in a few days, when all the hotels are booked and its already ~10 pm, there is nowhere to go. He said he would put me up somewhere - but I cannot leave until I know where I will stay the night and whether it will be safe. He and his colleague turn their back and start walking away. I call after them to tell me what the new hotel would be. To this he turns around and yells - I am going to get someone to calm you down. As a solo woman traveller, that statement was frightening - what did that mean? Was he going to get someone to physically force me out, or to intimidate me further or to argue more forcefully? They returned with a woman, who was mostly quiet, but asked them to get the sheets changed. I requested an incident report and process to file a formal complaint. She gave me the visiting card of the assistant front desk manager. When I challenged that he was not the right authority and that I needed to speak to the hotel manager, she said this is all she can do for me. And the intimidation got worse in the early hours of the morning - At checkout the next morning (3:30am), when I asked for an incident report, the same staff member appeared from behind the desk. I was not given an incidence report or a contact of senior management. He defaulted to the same tactic of deflecting with condescending & aggressive verbal comments, but even worse this time - he told me I was "rude, disrespectful, disingenuous, and a liar." I said I would like to wait in silence in the lobby until my cab arrived. And he then very aggressively asked me to get off his property - he physically came out from behind the front desk and started walking towards me, while yelling. It was 3:30am and I was evaluating whether it was safer to wait for my cab on the desolate street or in the lobby with this aggressive man. He also asked another person behind the desk to call someone to force me out. But before this escalated further, my cab thankfully arrived. He was the most senior person on duty, and that every member of staff I had interacted with reported directly to him. There was no neutral path seek help.
By VJ