Days Inn Dover Downtown

The Festering Puss-filled Cesspool that is the Days Inn Hotel in Dover, DE

Do you know when you watch CSI and they have to go to the crime scene at the seedy motel off the strip and it’s always disgusting and seedy and gross? The hotel where the serial killer dismembers someone in the bathroom and there’s a crack head in the next room who is obsessively picking an open sore who didn’t see or hear anything. When the crime scene techs show up, they flash the ultra-violet light on the sheets and there’s evidence of bodily fluids and they always say, “I doubt we are going to be able to get any prints as this room hasn’t been cleaned well in a very long time.” That hotel would be a vast improvement compared to The Days Inn located in Dover, DE.

I am appalled that a national chain, one that ironically advertises on television every half hour, spending millions upon millions of dollars telling people how wonderful they make their guests feel, would have such a wretched cesspool they call a hotel with their name on it. My three day stay at the “hotel”, and I use that word very lightly, began with the most inhospitable greeting possible. I gave the woman at the desk (identified only as being a little person as I didn’t ask her name) my name and said I was checking in. Check in time was 3 pm and I arrived around 3:30. She rudely told me that my room wasn’t ready and continued preparing to go home for the day. I politely asked what was being done to ready my room or if there was another room she could put me in and she was soooo entirely rude I was taken aback. She didn’t tell me when my room would be ready, she didn’t make any efforts to help me or even acknowledge my questions. She acted like I wasn’t even there. The other young lady, [redacted], was helping another guest and said she would be with me when finished.

The first room I was assigned the bed wasn’t made. CLEARLY, no maid had been in the room that day as it looked like someone had just fallen out of bed and walked out the room. I asked the maid who was standing outside the room when the room was going to be ready and she told me that the room was cleaned and the bed just needed to be freshened up. UGHHHH! She said that the bed just needed to be freshened up, which means whomever spent the night in that room was sleeping in a bed that … I can’t even think about it. I went back to the desk and asked the young lady for another room. She gave me a room that had rust on the refrigerator, a TV from 1984, furniture from 1973, and hadn’t been repaired or updated since 1962, (I only wish I was exaggerating) save a disgusting yellow paint job on the walls. Two room assignments later, I finally settled in to my accommodations, intent to make the best of a very, very bad situation.

If you plan on staying at the Days Inn in Dover, don’t plan on having a reliable internet connection. After I had settled in, I set up my laptop to get some work accomplished. I called [redacted] again, explaining this time that I had done everything I knew how to do and couldn’t connect to the internet. She physically came to the room to assist me (which I thought was very nice of her) and had to reset the router, which did allow me to connect … intermittently. There wasn’t a 30 minute period where I was able to stay connected, and when connected, the connection speed was so slow it was reminiscent of dial up at times.

My room had not been vacuumed as there was evidence of debris on the floor. Needless to say, I did not take my shoes off the entire time I was there nor did I sit on the toilet my first night until I was assured that it was clean. The fixtures and the furniture in the room look NOTHING like the pictures on their website. There was no stainless steel fridge and the door to the room looked like someone had used a crow bar trying to break in. Everything in the room was broken and old. To add insult to injury, someone had seemingly urinated in the AC unit so the smell of pee came out when it was turned on. The towel rack was held to the wall with a loose screw and there was … no exaggeration … a [redacted] washcloth in the safe. I called the front desk and asked them to have someone come and remove it and she said she would write a note for the cleaning staff to come remove it first thing in the morning.

The cleaning staff showed up shortly after 11 the next morning with no instructions to remove the [redacted] washcloth. Her name was Pam and she was very nice and apologized for the untidy state of the room. It wasn’t filthy, just not as clean as it should have been for sure. She told me that they were short staffed and she needed my towels to get them washed and she would be back to clean my room later. She did not come back to clean my room until after 5:30 pm. It seems that management, in their efforts to be extremely cheap and greedy, intentionally did not schedule a full cleaning staff that day and only scheduled TWO cleaning people for the entire hotel that should have had five people on staff to accommodate the number of guests they had the night before.

The guests in the hotel, some of whom I can only assume were permanent residents, were of questionable character and I did not venture out of my room after dark for fear I would be tied to the back of one of the hundred or so pickup trucks there and dragged to my death. It sounded like there was a band rehearsing, an actual heavy metal band practicing in one of the rooms. I can’t imagine there was anyone with a sound system that they brought to the hotel for an overnight stay that could produce that amount of volume so I can only assume that a band had set up rehearsal space there with the management’s approval for some head banging fun.

One of the amenities was supposed to be breakfast. There was a hand-written sign saying there was no juice, there were two empty containers that I can only assume held some form of cooked food earlier in the morning that no one had replaced, and there was a single, lone apple in a three tiered basket of fruit. The counters hadn’t been cleaned all morning and there were no plates at all. Suffice it to say, I didn’t eat anything there and I went to the Dunkin Donuts just a short distance away for the remainder of my stay for breakfast.

This hotel is not a 2 star hotel. It is a -2 star hotel. I would give it a 0 star rating had it been family owned and operated and not a national chain. This is a franchise of a chain that is owned by a conglomerate with executives who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and allowing this toilet of a hotel remain open. It is my understanding that Days Inn, Dover once had a contract with the Air Force for reservists to stay on their active weekends and they lost it when a high ranking officer was subjected to staying there. That means someone, several someones in fact, in the corporate headquarters was informed of the deplorable conditions of the hotel and they decided that it didn’t need updating, repair, or demolition. They INTENTIONALLY put images on the website to make the hotel look better than it is. They had the audacity to pay landscapers make the front of the hotel look pleasing and to put up a perimeter of crepe myrtle to hide the disrepair of hotel.

To the executives of Wyndham Hotels: You greedy, capitalist pigs. I will NEVER, as long as I live, spend another dime in ANY of your hotel chains. I find your level of greed and poor business practices to be reprehensible. I will make sure that all of my friends, family, and business associates know of my stay at your hotel and I will implore them to never spend a dime at any of your hotel chains. I stay in hotels quite frequently. I spent almost two weeks in the Microtel Inn in Dover about a month and a half ago and while it certainly wasn’t the best accommodations I’ve ever had, it was clean and adequate (and in the process of being updated which is why I was willing to be understanding of the transitional state it was in). Your decision to let that fetid, disgusting, hellhole called the Days Inn stay open without updating and renovating it speaks volumes about how little you care about your guests. You have the money to update and renovate, you simply choose to lie to and manipulate potential guests with pretty pictures on the internet and deceptive landscaping. It doesn’t have to be a five star hotel but it shouldn’t, under any circumstances, be as disgusting as it is. While I encountered two very nice employees, the other two were so completely rude and incompetent as to completely negate whatever positive impression I might have had. I would suggest that you’ve made your bed and now you have to lie in it but the bed is not made and the sheets are not clean.

Signed, An extremely disgruntled guest.

Scottie Lowe

As a follow up, I sent my letter to Wyndham Hotels Corporate Customer Service. They responded, telling me that the manager would get back to me in 7 days with a resolution. The manager did NOT get back to me. I contacted them again, explaining further that I was disappointed but not at all shocked that the manager hadn’t responded because clearly they allowed the place to be such a pit. They responded, 7 days later, saying that they would give me what would amount to half of what I paid for my stay there. I’m sorry, but that isn’t sufficient. This chain is a multi-million dollar corporation running what is the equivalent of a trailer park and it’s unacceptable. I’m sick and tired of corporations ripping off, cheating, and abusing their customers and then not being held accountable. I won’t stop until that place is shut down or renovated.

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