Our experience didn’t start out well when we had to wait over 10 minutes for someone to show up at the front desk so we could check in. The check in went quickly enough but a simple apology for the wait would’ve been nice.

The hotel has been partially remodeled but like usual when you remodel half of something the other half looks even worse. The furnishings were in general nice but the walls, doors, etc. were very beat up. The hotel had taken the effort to paint over most of the large cracks and other damage to the walls but they didn’t actually patch up the damage itself so it still looked bad. The room was indeed very large which was nice although a couch or some other furniture to actually fill up all that space would be nice. The hallways reeked of smoke (despite the hotel now being non-smoking) as did my room, although the smoke smell in my room was typically overpowered by the urine smell. It smelled like cat urine which I suppose is better than the alternative.

My traveling companion was disturbed enough by the hotel that he wanted to eat breakfast out instead of trusting their breakfast but I said it’d be fine. While I didn’t fear for my health it was another bad experience with both the waffle batter dispenser and the juice dispenser being broken. What bothered me most was that there was no effort to make up for this; they just put an out of order sign on the juice dispenser. There is no reason they couldn’t have put out some pitchers of juice instead.

The other hotels in Kalamazoo I’ve stayed at are the Radisson (overpriced but great location) and the Clarion (not perfect but a heck of a lot better than this place for a similar price). I don’t stay at Best Westerns often and given this experience that’s not likely to change.