service

after all the christmas happenings, my mom decided to spend some quality time with her grandchildren. she booked two rooms at the westin philippine plaza hotel. of course, she can't be expected to take care of 5 kids on her own so the whole family went with her. this was going to be my first stay in that hotel and i've heard so many good things about it, even if it wasn't as new as most of the hotels in the area were. i had very high expectations when we checked in and by the time we checked out, i promised myself not to stay on that hotel again, more so, i wouldn't recommend it to anybody else.

i dunno if it was just me, but i think they prefer foreign guests more than the local guests. when i saw them dealing with a foreign guest, they were ever so courteous but when dealing with local guests, the smiles were a little forced. but then again, maybe it was just my imagination...i really hope so. when we checked in, we requested for adjoining rooms with a connecting door. they said we had to wait coz they were still cleaning the rooms. so we waited for an hour only to find out our rooms didn't have a connecting door. so my brother and i requested for a transfer. after waiting for a long time, we were finally given adjoining rooms. ok, so maybe the hotel was packed that was why they were a little slow in doing things.

finally, we were inside our rooms. the first things i look for when i'm in a hotel room are the bathrooms and the closets. i knew the hotel was old but i didn't expect the bathrooms to be shabby. there were no toothbrush and toothpaste set and when i looked inside the closet, there were no slippers either! good thing my own toothbrush and toothpaste were always with me. but i thought it was a standard thing for a hotel, especially, a 5-star hotel to provide such simple things. hmmm...maybe i was over reacting. maybe they just forgot to put it there so i call up housekeeping. they told me they charge extra for a toothcare set, slippers, extra towels, extra blankets, extra pillows and everything else you could think of.

the thing is, i've stayed numerous times in other hotels, both the new ones and the not so new ones. but they didn't charge extra for everything unlike in philippine plaza. in fact, they were more than happy to provide extra pillows and extra blankets because that would mean a juicy tip for them.

oh, and when my sister-in-law claimed her car from the valet, the passenger seat was wet! our theory was, somebody slept in her car, turned on the airconditioner, opened the window a little, to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning and forgot all about it. whoever slept in the car wouldn't have been discovered had it not rained the whole night. talk about service!

on our second night, my mom asked me if i wanted to extend our stay for another night. i said no way! i would rather go home and play sims2 than stay there...unless we transferred to another hotel. hehehe