Howard Wisner

Review of Hotel Bellwether

My wife & I have stayed at this property off & on ...

My wife & I have stayed at this property off & on for more than 10 years. It's only an hour from our home, and we occasionally tayed there as a nice break from home, in a very nice property. Not low priced, but so nice we thought it worth going. The bay / harbor side rooms are really nice. Responding to an email offering special rates, we decided to visit for one night between Christmas & New Years. For the first time ever for us, we were majorly disappointed. All of our contacts with staff were friendly, but filled with excuses (and an out and out lie in one instance) for subpar service. As example, we decided to order room service (the in-house restaurant was closed by Covid restrictions), ordering a hamburger meal & a turkey sandwich meal. 10 minutes after ordering we received a call telling us the kitchen did not have bread for the sandwich. No matter the reason, the deficency jumped out to us as some person in food services not keeping track very well. But no big deal. We just switched that part of the order and ordered a second hamburger meal. About 20 minutes later one meal was delivered to our room. We asked about the other identical meal and the server told us he would bring the other burger up as quickly as possible. The second meal did not actually arrive until more than another 20 minutes later. My wife & I had to eat separately. The service person knew up front that there were two meals on our order, so we can only presume that apparently the kitchen did not connect the dots. The server was totally friendly both contacts, but did say that they were working short staffed, which was "making things interesting" then "sorry, thanks for being patient". Despite some prior poor service at check in, we did not make a big deal out of what was, to us, a very strange room service experience. We gave him a good tip. To top off our disappointments, the next morning we could not get any hot water in the shower in our room, just luke warm temp, too cool for us to use the shower. When checking out later I mentioned the lack of hot water (thought they should know) and was told "we've had numerous reports of the problem and are checking to see what's wrong. Sorry". The response was so totally casual (no sense of actual concern) that to us the message felt like a form of "this isn't a problem very high on my list". The front desk ckerk could not have done anything to change the hot water problem for us, but the apparent lapse in concern just seemed like one final confirmation of reason to be disappointed. We understand the stress of Covid on businesses like hotels, including the need to limit costs, but combining the several examples of poor service from one visit caused us to end up feeling like we'd just stayed at a surprisingly across the board dysfunctional hotel (at least during our stay), not the upscale property they have historically been, in our opinion. Until Covid passes we personally do not plan to stay here again. We hope things rebound at this property, but the service this visit was so start-to-finish subpar for us that we are not sure we'll trust them enough to find out.