The hotel with no name...

...we can only hope. Courtney and I just got back from a week-long holiday in Melbourne, which was quite excellent; we went on Puffing Billy, visited the Melbourne Zoo and the RAAF Williams Point Cook Museum, and shopped lots. Of course. Our accommodation, however, was sucky. In a major way. I cannot begin to do it justice in a short post. Instead, I will recreate, here at Blowing Up Space, my letter to Darling Towers. And a bit of advice for anyone planning on a Melbourne trip...for Christ's sake don't stay at 32 Darling Street...

To Whom It May Concern:

Recently my girlfriend and I stayed at your establishment at 32 Darling Street, South Yarra. As a result of this stay, between 4-9 July 2007, we would like to raise several serious concerns and complaints as to the running and condition of Darling Towers.

We had stayed with your company before, during the summer of 2006. At that time, we found our room to be adequate, and we decided to book again for Darling Street, due to its convenient location close to Chapel Street and the South Yarra train station. On this occasion, however, our lodgings were less than satisfactory. In fact, in certain respects, they were a threat to our health, and that of subsequent guests.

Upon arriving on the evening of 4 July, we soon discovered that our room was on the second floor. This in itself was not a problem, however we became concerned when we discovered that the front door to our room was jammed, and required considerable strength on my part to force it open. This jamming door was a major worry for us, as it would limit our chances of escape in the event of a fire. As I have already stated, we were lodged on the second floor; short of jumping out of the window (for obvious reasons, not the option of choice), the front door was our only way out of our apartment. Given that the kitchenettes of the apartments are equipped with gas stoves, it is completely intolerable that our only escape in the possibility of a fire would be so difficult to open. This fear was compounded when, on returning to our apartment the next day, we discovered that, even though smoking is prohibited in the building, the corridor reeked of cigarette smoke.

Later that night, we also discovered insects crawling over the microwave and bench in our kitchenette. When we had stayed at Darling Towers in 2006, our room had suffered an infestation of these same bugs, though we, probably being far more tolerant than the company deserved, ascribed this to the humid Melbourne summer, something out of the control of Darling Towers. Yet now, we find insects in our room in the dead of winter as well! It was not difficult to trace the source of these pests, though. Our room (Seventeen) had been fitted with a wall-mounted air-conditioner, which had, at some point in time, been removed and replaced by a smaller unit. Whoever had installed this unit, however, had not even attempted to seal the gaping hole that now opened the apartment to the outside world, subjecting us not only to every icy draught that blew outside the building, but also allowed our not-so-sanitary six-legged friends into the room. As you can imagine, by this stage we were completely unimpressed. But worse was to come.

In the morning, we decided that we would like a hot shower to start our first full day in Melbourne. This, I am sure, does not seem like anything unusual. What was unusual, however, was when our hot water suddenly cut out completely after only a few minutes, and did not at any point within the next half-hour reheat to anything resembling hot. Thus, we instead began our day with a frigid shower, and to make matters worse, when my girlfriend plugged in her hairdryer in the bedroom, we found that the power points did not work. Incidentally, we both fell ill that day. I am not suggesting that Darling Towers is responsible for every cold or flu bug in Victoria, but beginning a winter’s day with a freezing shower and the inability to dry one’s hair certainly would not have helped matters.

More than a little perturbed, I went downstairs to the reception desk to register a complaint. The man at reception, whose name I do not know, seemed to treat it as some vaguely amusing joke, before promising me that your “maintenance technician” would be up to fix everything shortly. It seems that your “maintenance technician” was a man with a can of bug spray, who told me that he was “expecting cockroaches”, and who proceeded to open the cupboards and, to my utter astonishment, shock and outrage, spray insecticide on, in, and over the provided kitchen utensils and crockery. He seemed not to be aware of our hot water issues, but after running the tap for a moment, he said it was “getting warm” (to my senses it was still far too cold to shower in). When I mentioned the door he said he might plane it later. This debacle was the very last straw. We stormed down to reception with a list of the problems in our room, including the fact that our crockery had now been poisoned. The same man as before was manning the desk, as well as another woman whose name also escapes me. The lady was far more sympathetic, and seemed to realise the severity of our predicament, even muttering “oh my God” when we related the tale of the bug spray-wielding maintenance man. On the other hand, the male receptionist regarded us with a somewhat smug and amused smirk, until the point when we made it very clear that, unless our living arrangements had improved by the time we returned from the city that afternoon, we would find alternative accommodation and would expect a full refund. At this point, we were assured that Darling Towers would “take care of it.” Indeed, by that evening we had been moved to apartment two, 8 Alexandra Street. Though I can in all honesty say that this room was exponentially superior to the one we had left behind, we discovered that evening that, again, the hot water did not seem to work properly. After some experimentation, we realised that the water would remain hot for approximately seven minutes at a time. From this, we theorised that the Darling Towers hot water systems are set on a timer. If this is the case, we were never informed of the fact. If this is not the case, then the hot water systems at Darling Street and Alexandra Street are simply atrocious, possibly due to the fact that they cannot be repaired by a tin of Baygon. We became so fed up with our treatment at the hands of Darling Towers that we did, indeed, seek alternative accommodation for the weekend.

I have not written this letter with the intention of soliciting some empty letter of apology from Darling Towers. Instead, I am insisting that some action be taken to improve the living conditions at your establishments, which are at present deplorable. With regards the hot water, it is outrageous that the usage be timed. We paid for our room; that includes usage of electricity and water. We planned many long day trips in and around Melbourne; it is natural that we might have wanted a somewhat more relaxing start to the day than a mad rush to wash before the water turned freezing. Moreover, it is no exaggeration to say that our very lives were put in the gravest danger by the malfunctioning front door, especially with the presence of gas lines and cookers in most of the Darling Street apartments. I am not a small man, and I found that, with a considerable effort, I could force our door open. What chance, I wonder, would less powerfully built guests, perhaps even children, have if there were a fire and they were trapped in a room similar to the death-trap that was number seventeen? How many other rooms at Darling Street have defective and dangerous doors? I do not accept the explanation offered to me that the company was “not aware” of the problem. I was under the impression that the term “serviced apartment” means that staff gain access to the apartments in order to, as the name suggests, service them. The staff must therefore have been fully aware that the door jammed, just as they would have been well aware of the large hole in the wall, through which cold blasts of air and unwelcome insects poured. That these flaws existed in the first place is an indicator of the substandard level of maintenance at the facility. That there had been no measures taken to correct them, even though they must have been well-known to the staff of Darling Towers, is likewise an indicator of the disturbingly cavalier and dismissive attitude that the company has towards customers who pay in good faith. When we booked, we were not expecting a room akin to a Ritz penthouse, but we did at least expect a room with reliable hot water and sanitary conditions, free from fire hazards and bug infestations. We certainly did not pay for a man to spray insecticide on crockery that we are expected to eat from. Granted, we did not intend to use the kitchen utensils anyway, but what about other guests in other rooms, or even those who later booked our room? What guarantee is there that the same thing hasn’t happened hundreds of times? How would Darling Towers explain to its guests that its maintenance personnel have knowingly and willingly poisoned the very table- and kitchenware that they are using to prepare dinner? How can any of the appalling service and conditions that we were forced to suffer during our stay be explained at all?

As I am certain you will have determined from the content of this letter, during our stay at Darling Towers we experienced events and practices that cannot be dismissed as annoyances or inconveniences, but rather grossly negligent behaviour and conditions that surely contravene a great many of Victoria’s health and safety regulations. As such, we are seriously considering contacting the authorities, in the hope that they might take action to ensure that no one else has to put up with the same outrages that we did. Whatever the outcome, I can assure you that we will never again stay at any of your company’s facilities, and we will actively dissuade friends, relatives and colleagues from doing so as well. Your company very nearly ruined our holiday. We believe that this is the least we can do in return.

Yours sincerely,

Bodie A. Ashton.-