What I've been looking forward to this year was AnimeNext, which is central New Jersey's biggest convention and it has been running for ten straight years with no sign of it slowing down. My friends and I had plan to go and this year we decided to try something new, getting a hotel room. It was difficult in deciding which hotel would benefit us, since we wanted one that was close to the convention (none of us own cars so it had to be a decent walking distance), spacy to fit us comfortably and cheap.
We finally decided on Staybridge Suites, it was a good price, they have complimentary breakfast buffet, we got the 2-bedroom/2 bath suite (with a sofabed) with a fully-equipped kitchen. It was exactly what we needed because we wanted to be comfortable, save money, and be able to cook our own meals since convention food and hotel food is overprice. We booked the room in advance so we didn't need to worry about it being taken by someone else and we wanted the special advance price because we save money in doing so.
Anyway, the first day of the convention didn't start that great. Friday at 7:45 is when we all met up at Newark Penn Station to board the train to New Brunswick. But some of us were running a bit late so we had to take a later train to get there. Of course, we didn't expect the train to be running late as well. It was delay for 15 mins, then 20 mins, then 25 mins and then another 25 mins. We were hoping to get to the convention early but the delays just made it take longer to get there which we couldn't do anything about it. So when the train finally came we decided to go to the convention first to get our per-registration badges before going to the hotel to check in and drop off our bags.
Now this is the part where it started to became a nightmare. Things just seem to go wrong one after the other and it all lead to the hotel. We got there to check in, only to be told that we can't get our room because THEY didn't take the money out of the credit card for the room. Every time my friend called them to make sure they will take the money out (she was finding it strange that when it was getting closer to the convention they didn't take out the money after all that time) they told her that they haven't yet and will get to it. Basically only till we got there did they tell us that they didn't take out the money for the room because there's a problem with the system that takes the money out.
They were blaming it on my friend, then they tried to blame it as the card's fault but in reality it's them. Their system that retrieves the money was at fault and they should have informed my friend of the problem as soon as possible. They basically gave us a hard time about it, not helping us find a solution for our troubles. Hell, they wanted to make us pay more for a new room and after two hours of trying to fix it, we finally got our original room.
It wasn't easy, we tried to fix the situation ourselves but when we realize that we weren't going anywhere we called for backup. Another friend called his mother and he explain the situation and she tried to help by taking a turn talking to the manager. We finally got somewhere but it wasn't by much. In the end a friend saved us by resorting to getting a random stranger to help us. The price of doing that was that he gets a $100 if he helped us.
After all that we finally got our room and we hoped that after all that trouble the room would be amazing and worth it. The room was great, better then I expected but after that we decided not to come to this hotel because the service sucks like hell. Also, on the same day...we were locked out of our room and if it wasn't for one of my friends heading back early for a nap (and waking up). We would have been stuck outside nearly all night since we came back to the hotel at night. So apparently they only gave us one key that worked, the key that our friend had to get in.
That was how it started for us, a nightmare before it turned into a rainbow later on. If it wasn't for the room actually being nice with a kitchen and the convention we would have been disappointed and unhappy. Again we're not going back to that hotel because of this as well as the distance to it from the convention and vice verse because it's a long walk. Our energy drain a lot faster with all the walking we did and we ended up being to exhausted for the late night events.
