Review of Armon Hotel & Conference Center Stamford CT 4*

I stayed in this hotel for 3 nights and was extremely disappointed with the whole experience, which is very different from what I am accustomed to at a Crowne Plaza hotel in other places in the world. Although the room, the lobby and facilities are ok, the quality of the service in the hotel is dismal. This starts with the housekeeping, with dust on the shelves and windows sills, beds not made up properly, soap and shampoo not re-filled and staff entering the room without knocking (on three occasions). The room itself is reasonable, although there is no bath and no fridge (yes it can be rented at additional cost…) and also no rail to hang up wet bath towels, just a simple hook. The food in the restaurant is also VERY bad. Due to time constraints I was forced to have dinner in the hotel on all three days. E. G. I had a chicken parmesan and thought that there were bones in the chicken. It turned out that the chicken did not have bones in it, but that it was overcooked to such an extent that the meat had turned rock hard. On the other occasions, the food was equally poor, with burnt hamburgers and overcooked fries. All-in-all, greasy an unimaginative food. The waiters in the restaurant, with all good intentions, had clearly never had ANY training whatsoever, judging by the clumsy way that the food was placed on the table, asking for your order without having given the menu first, etc. Etc. During the stay there was an electricity outage, apparently caused by a technical failure in the street of hotel. Of course, this can happen to any hotel and is beyond the control of the hotel management. However, I simply could not believe the unprofessional way that this situation was handled by management. There was NO information at all to the guests, no updates, no gestures to alleviate the inconvenience of the power outage…. Nothing! I had been waiting at the elevator for a long time, not knowing that they were out of order. So I suggested to the staff that they put a temporary sign to indicate to everyone that they could not use the elevator. No reaction. I mentioned it again, twice a few hours later. No reaction. It turns out that the safety stairways don’t have a separate lighting system, so in case of an emergency with power failure, there is NO lighting in these corridors. This is a SAFETY issue and totally unacceptable. The strange thing is that all the decorative lighting in the lobby was working perfectly, but the stairways, which we had to use because the elevator wasn’t working, were pitch black. The power outage lasted for about 12 hours, during which the air-conditioning did not work. Strangely enough the air-conditioning fan in my room was still blowing (warm air) and making a very strange noise which prevented me from sleeping. I called the front desk at 23.30 to ask if this could be switched off, and they promised to send someone to the room. When no one showed up, I called again at 24.00 hrs. Again no one showed up. Finally at 1.00 am the city council was able to fix the defects and the electricity. By then, still no one had showed up from the hotel… I mentioned these issues on a number of occasions to the staff and front desk. One gentlemen said that he would inform his manager and that the manager would get in touch with me during the day. Again NO reaction and NO interest whatsoever to resolve any of these issues. At check-out again I expressed my total dissatisfaction with the hotel. The front desk officer tried to call the hotel manager, who was in another meeting again and obviously didn’t think it was important enough to address a concern from one of front desk staff. In summary: this was one of the worst stays so far in the past 15 years or so as IHG Platinum member. I felt a total disrespect as a guest. There is a real MANAGEMENT problem in this hotel. They don't understand value for the customer and don't enable their staff to do a good job through proper standards, proper training, proper coaching, etc.