Padre Hotel

No AC, No Fridge, No Wi-Fi, No Privacy, No Sheets!

No AC, No Fridge, No Wi-Fi, No Privacy, No Sheets! The Padre Couldn’t Care Less.

Our stay at the Padre was so completely miserable, and their complete non-response to a (very polite) letter of complaint I sent them has left me so frustrated, I want to be sure I include each of the many ways they failed us.

After a 10 day road trip, we wanted to stay somewhere special. The Padre Hotel certainly seemed to fit the bill: a gorgeous old building, newly renovated in a hip and attractive style.

The friendly and polite desk clerk explained that the shower was designed and positioned in a way that didn’t allow much privacy. Okay, we could live with that.

It was a hot night and the room was hot, too - the windows had been left open, so the air conditioning couldn’t do its job. With no crank on the windows, we called the desk, who sounded surprised the windows were open in the first place. Looking for a refrigerator to store our dinner leftovers, I opened the fridge cupboard door to find…no refrigerator. So much for our leftovers.

The desk chair was broken and almost threw me twice. Wi-fi service was nonexistent, despite promises to the contrary.

Turning the light on in the bathroom, we saw that it wasn’t just the shower that was open to the room, but the ENTIRE BATHROOM. In other words, if you’re anywhere in the room, you have a front row view of the toilet. No mention of this was made at check-in; if it had been, we would have sought other accommodations. Lack of privacy in the shower is a very different thing from lack of privacy in the bathroom! How this arrangement didn’t occur to someone at some point as a monumentally bad idea is mind-boggling.

Turning down the bed for the night revealed only a rather badly stained mattress cover. NO SHEETS. You read that right: NO SHEETS ON THE BED. Exasperated, we dressed once again and I phoned the front desk, and again staffers were dispatched to make the bed. But they did a poor job and we ended up having to RE-MAKE the bed ourselves.

At checkout I complained to the staffers on desk about our extremely challenging and unpleasant evening. They said they'd take 15% off - an insult, when you consider all we had to deal with. When I got home I wrote a polite letter of complaint and sent it to two Padre managers, their general email address, and their parent company. The parent company email kicked back to me as a bad address, and weeks later, NO ONE at the Padre has replied at all.

The Padre should be ashamed. And travelers should consider themselves warned.