Staying at the Renaissance Allentown Hotel was the...

Staying at the Renaissance Allentown Hotel was the worst hotel experience of my life.

Almost every staff member acted in a manner that was unprofessional not befitting a 4-star hotel, and not remotely worth the price paid.

From the valets, to the desk check-in attendant it was off to a bad start. I've stayed at hotels from lesser brands with more competent staff. The valet attendant made a comment about how thankfully my wife doesn't have a hard to pronounce last name. Xenophobic much? The check-in attendant was more interested in telling us about BonVoy (whatever that is) instead of telling us information about the hotel. We had to Google the checkout time in the morning because it wasn't told to us at check-in and wasn't in the room anywhere.

The design of the hotel was bizarre, like someone went to HomeGoods and picked up a bunch of random stuff from the clearance section. The room was equally bizarre, but the bed was at least comfortable. The towels, though, were terrible. Extremely thin and not absorbent, they were actually painful to dry myself with.

After the wedding we attended was over, a bunch of us went to the bar at the hotel for drinks. There were 3 different wedding parties staying at the hotel that night and they thought it was sufficient to have 2 bartenders? And while I feel for the bartenders, its not a good for the hotel if the bartenders get angry at customers for wanting to order a few drinks for the group, as happened to my wife.

Room service the next day wasn't great either. They put us on hold for 10 minutes until we hung up and called back. They forgot part of our order, didn't have regular bagels and replaced them with two mini bagels (one plain and one everything) without asking when I had originally asked for a plain bagel.

The icing on the cake was when we went to pick up our rental car and the valet attendant said a valet driver had backed the rental into a box on the wall and damaged the rear bumper. Thankfully they gave us paperwork and it seems like the company will pay, but now we're stuck with hours of calls and paperwork to deal with for something that we didn't do.

Thanks Renaissance Allentown for almost ruining my weekend. The wedding was a lot of fun, but not at all thanks to this hotel.