There are many hotels that strive to provide their customers a better-than-expected experience, realizing that many will return. The Comfort Inn in Charlotte is not among them. This hotel provides an atmosphere that says its customers are an obligation to be met. It does meet the obligations, but the experience leaves one wanting - wanting one of the other hotels nearby.
My family and I stayed for one night in early September as an overnight stay during a long road trip. We checked in to discover our AC unit barely cranking a cool breeze. Oddly, the room was equipped with an air cleaning appliance, as though someone thought this would compensate for a broken AC unit, but it did nothing for the room temperature. To the hotel's credit the friendly lady at the front desk apologized that because maintenance had left for the day (it was around 5:45 PM) she would be pleased to switch us to a second room. That was well-handled, and initially compensated for our inconvenience. The second room was appreciably cooler (and bereft of an auxiliary air cleaner), although in the bathroom the bottom of the vinyl tub-surround was grey - not dirty, just discoloured - but projecting a dingy look nonetheless. The rest of the room, fridge and microwave all seemed quite clean. Our family tends to travel with plenty of wi-fi enabled devices, and discovered that the hotel's wi-fi didn't work with half of them. There was a third party support line whose personnel seemed knowledgeable, but ultimately nothing improved. I switched to dialup for one of these, and yet here too things failed - a reflection of the phone line quality. Perhaps the fact that I had to jiggle the phone cord in the wall to get the phone to work at all should have been a warning.
Breakfast at a Choice Hotel is usually a feature, but we'll never know about the Comfort Inn Charlotte's. Despite being told on check-in that weekend breakfasts ended at 10:30, theirs actually ended at 9:30. Instead at 9:30 we were dealing with the brown sludge coming out of the shower's hot water supply. That was probably fortunate. A cold shower was just what we needed to compensate for lack of sleep brought about by a long night of people running up and down the hallways to shouts of "yo" and treating us repeatedly to the sound of slamming doors. Discovering that housekeeping had forgotten to supply our room shampoo simply crowned the experience.
In fairness this wasn't a catastrophe, but it was very much sub par for a Choice Hotel. There are so many other options nearby, including other Choice Hotels, that when we're in the neighbourhood again, we'll be choosing one of those.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC