I refuse to take any photos of the hotel because I don’t think it can help you see the filth in my bath tub. There was a disturbing layer of sediment and you can’t avoid it because the shower and bath tub are together. The hotel facilities are dated so I made sure that it was actual white powder on the bath tub, not just scratches on the bath tub surface.
Picture this: you landed after a flight and headed straight to the hotel for a quick shower. The last thing you want is an uncleaned bath tub. When I called the front desk, they sent a housekeeping staff with no manager to inspect lapses in their cleaning standards. I watched the staff clean the room – she wasn’t told the bathtub was dirty so she just sprayed a thin layer of cleaning liquid and ran the taps. But the bath tub was still sandy. You can feel the sand with the soles of your feet. My patience ran thin so I just took a shower.
On the whole, there were multiple lapses in service standards. The front desk wasn’t well trained to deal with such situations and didn’t communicate clearly with the other teams in the hotel. Housekeeping couldn’t adhere to basic hygiene practices and didn’t take the problem seriously. The manager didn’t show seriousness about bringing up the issue with the wider team and rectifying the systemic lapses that led to such problems. I was promised a room change the next day morning, but even that was not properly handled. They let me choose a time but the room wasn’t ready even when I went down an hour later. The assistant manager was more experienced than the manager, which speaks volumes about mismanagement at the hotel, and tried to smooth it over but I could tell the front desk wasn’t briefed about this. There were multiple times when I felt the front desk, while not ill-intentioned, was questioning the integrity of my claims. I will not take that from a front desk staff.
I don’t know if dirty rooms are a common occurrence at Hilton, with pervasive cost cutting becoming apparent across the hotel. But this whole fiasco made me lost one precious afternoon and a whole morning that could have been well spent exploring Toronto. If you are planning to book with an OTA like Trip.com, I highly recommend you rethink because Hilton will likely assign you the worse, dirtiest and most dated rooms. I guess dated rooms are fine, but it can’t even guarantee basic hygiene. I’m not asking for Intercontinental but even Holiday Inn does better. You are better off staying somewhere else. This has shattered my confidence in Hilton and the whole hospitality group.
