If you like to stay in a hotel where the entire building smells like a campfire, this place is for you. The hotel has a wood burning fireplace. As the evening wore on, the hallways and the rooms (including ours) got smokier and smokier. Even with our window cracked wide open, it was still smoky in the room..and now cold.. Complaints to the front desk went nowhere. . The front desk disclosed to us that they had some sort of problem w/ the fireplace and would put more wood on the fireplace to build it up & make it less smoky. (Um, hello, why even have a fire in it if you know there's problems with it?)
Then, at 11:30 pm, the fire alarms went off. First, hotel staff said that it was because someone was smoking which set off both the smoke detector & the fire alarms too. Then, they said that it was b/c of the smoke from the fireplace. And still there was a fire in the fireplace! That was it for us, we demanded our money back. We got our refund.
All communication to the hotel guests regarding this incident was provided by the hotel staff. There were no fire marshal or management personnel present to confirm the information provided by hotel staff that this was a "false alarm."
It wasn't until the fire alarms went off that the hotel decided to do something about the smoky conditions and turned on the ventilation (fans) in the hallways.
Poor customer service, and a management staff that seems to have not cared one iota that this was going on, makes this a total fail. Management should have been present to speak with the hotel guests to provide assurances of safety, etc.
We left and went home. As we were leaving at midnight, we noted the presence of maintenance men peering into the vents on our floor, which seems to suggest a ventilation problem in the hotel with the fireplace rather than the cigarette by a hotel guest, as the cause of the problem.
Other then this, the beds were good, the room was clean. You may want to consider staying here during the summer, where it's less likely the wood burning fireplace will be in use.
- Banff Caribou Hotel
- Banff Caribou Lodge
- Caribou Lodge
- Caribou Banff
- Caribou Lodge Banff
