The Ontario Airport Marriott is a nice hotel in a rather remote location about 50 miles east of Los Angeles. I stayed their last year for a conference and again this past weekend for the same conference. Check my review for my thoughts on the stay from last year.
My stay this year reminded me of some of the areas that greatly need improvement. Overall, the hotel is nice and the staff were very friendly. But service is quite uneven. Last year the bar and restaurant staff seemed ill prepared for the volume of traffic created by the conference. As I said in my initial review, “Service in the restaurant and bar was glacial.” This year it wasn’t too much better. My recollections stopped me from ordering food in the bar or even the restaurant. My observations in the bar showed that it’s still not recommended to order food while you’re hungry, because you’ll get a lot hungrier. I got smart and made sure my meals were taken offsite.
I had no choice but to eat out on Saturday night, as the restaurant was closed altogether due to a large reunion taking place practically in the lobby. I guess it’s better to close the restaurant then subject people to very slow service. I had a couple of other pet peeves about this particular visit.
The concierge lounge was shut down on Friday night when I could swear the sign said it would be open. Sure, you could gain access. But the place was eerily empty with no staff or amenities to speak of. Several conference attendees sat on a couch in disbelief and talked about the lack of service. That morning I had a wonderful breakfast in the same lounge so maybe it was a Friday night thing.
This particular Marriott also has a nice little kiosk for printing out your boarding pass. But they also charge $2.95 for three minutes on the machine that connects you to the internet. Why charge $2.95 just to print out a boarding pass. It seems to me that they’re just trying to pull every dollar from the customer rather than to just provide them with a helpful service. Luckily, the wired internet access in my room was speedy and reliable. So I used Continental Airlines’ system to fax my pass to the front desk.
I’m not saying that this is a bad hotel. The rooms are nice. The people are friendly. And they have a nice pool and small fitness center. But they still need to work on preparing for the volume of traffic that comes from the convention center across the street. They should consider dropping the ridiculous fee to print out a boarding pass.
Will I stay there again if the conference is held in Ontario next year? Probably. But I hope that I’ll be able to count on a little better service to make my stay that much more pleasant.