Epic FAIL- Why I'm never staying in a Trump hotel again (and why you shouldn't either)

I travel frequently and therefore, deal with lots of hotels and hotel staff. My recent weekend experience at the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City was, by far, the worst experience I've ever had (and I once stayed in a hotel that had a water pipe burst on the 5th floor and flood all the floors below it down to the lobby). This was worse than that.

Why?

Because the staff at the Trump Plaza seems to be confused about proper customer service. It took us three hours to check in and it wasn't because there was a line.

Annette, Katrina and I were extremely happy when we arrived for our girls' weekend in Atlantic City well within the proper check-in time after making excellent time driving to the beach. Unfortunately, the time we saved avoiding traffic was siphoned away during our check-in process.

According to the first person at the check-in desk who helped us, there was some sort of mis-communication between Orbitz and the hotel because when we arrived, the hotel did not have a record of my reservation, despite the fact that I booked it a week and a half prior to our arrival. I pulled up the Orbitz e-mail confirmation on my iPhone and it still wasn't good enough. So, I called Orbitz and after 20 minutes on hold listening to Canon in D, I finally got through to “Ethan” in India and asked him to re-fax my reservation. He did and so I thought our ordeal was nearly over.

Wrong!

The re-faxed confirmation with the original date also wasn't good enough for the hotel reservation supervisor. She refused to confirm our reservation and had the (now second) person who was helping us tell us the hotel was fully booked. But since people were coming in off the street and booking rooms and others were upgrading to better ones, I was reasonably sure that the reservation supervisor was full of poo. So there we stood, just wanting the room we had already paid for. (And in the meantime, the first person who had helped us returned from her hour-long break, which she went on while I was on hold with Orbitz, and couldn't believe we were still there. Yeah.)

Finally, after two hours of battling with Orbitz and the front desk staff, and the front desk staff trying to move us to the Trump Marina, the front desk supervisor finally came out to help us. He had us fax our confirmation (again- which meant more time on the phone with Orbitz) directly to him to bypass the reservation supervisor. Shockingly, he managed to get us a room in the "fully booked" hotel (now three hours after we began the check-in process). So, obviously there were rooms available, but apparently, if there is mis-communication between Orbitz and Trump Plaza, it is the customer's fault and they are fully punished for it in the form of terrible customer service and wasted time.

Our stay didn’t improve much after check-in since this customer service confusion thing extended well beyond the shiny, marble top check-in desk.

Moral of the story- don’t stay at any Trump facility ever.

Sorry, Donald, you’re fired.