My teenage son and I traveled with a group this past weekend and our group booked hotel accommodations at the Clarion. Before we left, I reviewed the hotel on this site and thought it would be fine for one night. I travel quite a lot for my job and have done so for years. Net, I have stayed in the best and the worst and generally I am a very easy guest. As long as the room is clean and in a safe area, I am okay.
Here’s where the story goes south. We arrived at the Clarion and, like other reviews have stated, it’s located behind two other seedy motels (Travelodge and Rodeway Inn). The Travelodge appears to be closed. As we got off the bus, all of our parties’ key packs were laid out in an orderly fashion with names and room numbers. I found my name, grabbed my key and headed into the Clarion. To my surprise, my room number was 334 which was not in the Clarion but next door at the Rodeway Inn. Rooms at the Clarion begin with 500 and go up to the 700’s. Rooms 100 – the 300’s are located next door at a very nasty, very tired Rodeway Inn. I later found out that the Clarion owns the Rodeway Inn and routinely overbooks itself and puts spillover travelers like me in The Rodeway. Well, it’s only for one night, how bad can it be?
We went to our room and went in. To our surprise, our room wasn’t a typical motel room; it was a meeting room complete with conference table. There was a sofa and roll-a-way bed in the room. The roll-a-way’s springs were rusted and appeared to have survived both World Wars. The bathroom was closed off from the main room by a broken wooded partition, privacy, heck no it’s over-rated. The tub was filthy. This is pretty funny, my son is all boy. He’s an excellent athlete, always up for a challenge and, like his father, can pretty much sleep anywhere. He showered with his socks on. The room was a smoking room and had numerous ash trays around for your pleasure. The TV was perhaps the oldest working TV on the planet. I thought that the original Ed Sullivan show would come on if I turned it on. There wasn’t a channel changer with the set and; my son thought it was pretty neat as he has never seen a set that old. The picture was bad as you would expect. The room was so nasty we called a cab which took us to Walmart whereby we purchased two new pillows to sleep on. After we left, we threw them away. The water in the right sink barely ran at all, just a trickle. The “chandelier” was only 5 feet or so above the floor. We had to move the oversized table to open the sleeper sofa and roll-a-way. Net, I slammed into the darn thing with my head three times. I got two hours of sleep or so Friday night. I kept thinking we were going to be on an episode of Cops or something. Oh yea, all of the buttons on the phone and on the TV were sticky.
So now you are asking, why didn’t you call and change rooms? We tried and the Clarion/Rodeway was completely sold out. So was everything else nearby. There was an Ole Miss/Arkansas game that weekend and everything in town was booked. We would have left in a minute, but had two constraint lines: transportation and availability. There is a commercial out now whereby a person goes into a hotel room with a hazmat suit on. If you have one of those available, stay here, if not, drive an hour or so north and stay in Memphis or at another hotel in the area.

One positive note, A-1 Cab company shuttled us to Walmart and back is really good and economical.