Review of Woodcliff Hotel and Spa 4*

I recently stayed at the Woodcliff Hotel and Spa for a weekend with my Mother. I am not one to publicly write a review on an establishment unless I feel either a) the service was perfection beyond imagination or b) the service was horrible beyond belief or in completely preventable ways. Unfortunately the latter is why we are here. I will say the first red flag should have been that a week before we left we made appointments at the spa for facials and pedicures. We never received a confirmation so a few days prior my Mom called to confirm. They said they could not accommodate us for the services we initially booked and we could either each get a pedicure or one of us could get a facial. Once we arrived, we were greeted by very friendly bellmen and valets as well as a a fine receptionist. However, I quickly noticed that I was in the same age-range of everyone (except for one bellman) who worked at this hotel. But that's fine. Things seemed to be fine until we went down to the spa for our pedicures. The girl came in to get me from the waiting area — did not introduce herself (I know her name was "Meaghann" thanks to her name tag) and told me to sit in the chair where I then proceeded to burn my feet in what can only be described as boiling water. With nothing even close to a sorry she carried on and began my pedicure. My Mom came in and was getting her pedicure done by another girl who was very polite and quite nice. Then out of nowhere Meaghann tapped my leg and said "girlfriend your feet need some love". Now, I don't really have a reaction to that. I still don't know what to say. It was just plain rude. She rushed through the entire service while doing the bare minimum of everything. Then she put the polish on my toes and all I can say is that clearly colouring between the lines was not her strongpoint in school because that nail polish was all over my cuticles, under my nail, on the side of my toes. Just horrible. So needless to say, that did not impress me. The next day we checked out of the hotel and my Mom said that she was going to pay a portion of the bill in traveler's cheques. Now, as I said earlier a majority of the staff is my age and definitely have not been in this industry very long at all. However, there is no excuse for the argument that then followed. She insisted that they did not take "CHEQUES" and only took credit cards. After we tried to explain to her that a traveler's cheque is basically cash, similar to a money order, she continued to argue and say "well we don't take them". Finally she called accounting but instead of actually asking the question, she said "Hi. We don't take traveler's cheques, right? ". Then there came a very long silence during which her face started to change. Then I hear a slight "Oh" come out of her mouth and I knew she had been told otherwise. Here's the thing — I understand that people mainly use credit cards now and you may have never seen a traveler's cheque before. But rule in your training should have been not to be rude to guests. I will say that this is not completely her fault because whoever trained her did a horrible job. She clearly did not received the information she needed. So all this plus the fact that this hotel really wants to be a five star but they clearly do not have the capital nor the staff to make it come even close, makes for a disappointing stay. I am thankful to all the other staff, who were indeed very nice and pleasant to deal with. But I will never stay there again. There needs to be some serious restructuring going on at this place.