The Citizen Hotel has an event space on its 7th floor. Yesterday morning at 645am someone began soundchecking for an event that, as it turned out, began at 830am (on a Friday morning). Every few minutes they would blast U2 and "check 1, 2" into the very loud microphone. The room they gave me was on the 10th floor directly above the event area. Two other people in my party (on the 7th fl) itself were also woken up. We'd had a tough week and were very much looking forward to a good night of sleep. At 830am the sound of some large event (applause, crowd laughter, speeches) began. So several issues: why did they not warn me that such an event was scheduled at 830am? More importantly, why would they schedule such an event at 830am when the event area was surrounded by dozens of rooms? I complained and they were relatively friendly, but when they discovered that my room was purchased through Expedia, they suggested there was nothing they could do but they would offer me a $50 credit at their hotel restaurant. This seemed small comfort given that they'd already agreed to comp all three rooms that had problems. I ultimately convinced them to give me equivalent value for the rooms they'd agreed to comp.
So in the end I reached a satisfactory solution, but it was quite surprising that it took so much work on my part (and they did not have a more proactive attitude) and indeed they did not seem particularly apologetic about what I saw as egregiously bad hotel management. Given that they have just opened, you'd expect mix-ups and kinks, but an attitude that does not reflect a particularly enthusiastic attitude toward fixing problems is one that cannot easily be changed. It likely reflects the attitude of senior management and manifests itself in the way staff are hired and trained.
This all said, the rooms were very nice. But I had to work too hard to get satisfaction in the face of a hotel mistake and did not get the good night's sleep that I really needed. A recommendation for the hotel: just because customers purchased nights of stay through Expedia does not mean the hotel should wash itself of responsibility for issues and try to direct customers to deal with Expedia's bureacracy. Please do yourself a favor and work out a policy for handling these sorts of things administratively as I'm sure you will get many customers through web reservations.
