40 Reviews
Yeouido Park Centre, Seoul - Marriott Executive Apartments
Yeouido Seoul|1.18km from Yeongdeungpo Station
This used to be my favorite in Seoul, and I stuck with it even though the furniture, walls and floors were so banged up even 5 years ago that the place needed a renovation. My last stay has convinced me it is time to give up on this place. Where the issues in the past used to be mostly cosmetic, now they are fundamental. First, our rooms—see attached photos. Dirty with defective windows (bathroom and bedroom, with an obvious impact on the room temperature). Clearly no one had cleaned that shower properly in a long time, and the floor manager did not check properly. Clearly also no one had checked the condition of the windows in a long time, or (my suspicion) had decided not to do anything about it. Remarkable the response of the staff when shown the photos of the ice: ”It was especially cold last night”—as if temperatures below -10 degrees Centigrade were not common in Seoul *every winter*. We changed rooms, the new one was better and got a thorough cleaning before we moved in, but cleaning continued to be hit and miss, and the windows in that room were leaky as well. The bedroom in particular, with windows on two sides, had a persistent icy draft. We made it bearable by putting lots of pillows and cushions against the windows and using tissues, towels and packing tape to seal some of the gaps. (I still cannot believe that this was needed, in Korea, in 2021, in a building that is maybe 15 years old...) Usually if something is this badly wrong, you would expect a proactive effort to compensate the guest. Not so in this case. We finally managed to get some compensation, but why the guest should have to push for this when the hotel clearly did not live up to its end of the bargain—a clean room that offers protection from the elements, at least—is a mystery to me. During this entire process, no senior management was ever seen. It seems like the MD never interacts with the guests—which perhaps explains the state of disrepair. Nor does his direct report. Everything was left to junior managers without decision power. And just as I thought we had somehow reached a livable resolution, the final chapter: The hotel had pre-charged my credit card for the entire stay at the beginning—for 3 weeks. No problem, one would think, except that the final charge was lower because of the compensation offered. So what did they do? Charge back the original amount and the re-charge for the new total. Predictable result: I lost about 5% of the total sum in credit card transaction fees, or about 1 night's worth. When I pointed this out during check-out, I was told this was the only way they could do it. So in sum: room condition, cleanliness, complaint management, and accounting were all deficient. So on everything that really counts as basic, performance was abysmal. In retrospect, we should have moved out.
Excellent
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