“Acceptable but tired. Managed and run by smokers and parts of the hotel are stinky.”
I am a business traveler, I spent three to four nights a week in the Corning Staybridge Suites for about six months I would rate the hotel as overall good not great. I’ve got one major gripe listed towards the end of this review. This is a long review, please read it all the way through.
Location – great if you are working at Corning, Inc. headquarters or staying here to go to Corning Museum of Glass. Also good for downtown Corning.
Rooms - They are spacious, comfortable bed, mini-kitchen, and depending on room either a counter or table to eat on. . The paint in a lot of these rooms is getting kind of tired, they almost all need repainting. Carpets , furniture, and drapes are all pretty good. Bedding and towels good. Overall, the rooms are okay. One of my coworkers alleges he had a roach in his room, but I never saw one in the six months I was there.
TVS – Horrible old tube TVs, when you watch a DVD (on the Staybridge standard DVD player), the picture vibrates with the sound (and this happened in every single room I was in, not a case of one bad TV). The original equipment remotes are rarely present; the replacement universal remote is rarely programmed to operate the DVD player. Bud knows how to program these, but he isn’t always around.
Public Areas - The interior corridors and stairwells are worn out; The wallpaper is very scratched up, carpets dirty (the kind of dirty that shampooing can’t fix). The conditions aren’t inexcusable, but the hotel doesn’t look as good as it should on the inside. The front desk, business center, library, and great room are nice though.
Breakfast – In other reviews some people stated how great the breakfast is. These people obviously don’t stay at hotels much. This is a boring, standard (but passable) buffet breakfast. Sometimes the breakfast area gets super busy; the breakfast lady can’t keep up. They run out of clean dishes and you have to eat on disposables, the food doesn’t get replaced as much as it should, the tables don’t get cleaned fast enough, it just gets kind of out of control. Lately the managers have been helping out when it gets busy, and things have gotten better. At best, however, breakfast is just good but nothing special.
Evening dinner a.k.a “Sundowner” – kind of like breakfast, except worse. Once in a while they have pizza or barbecue, which are far superior to most options. The red wine is served chilled, which is just plain wrong.
Pool – very good
Exercise equipment – nothing to write home about, but usable.
Laundry – Machines often break. The cycles on these machines take too long, which leads to lack of machine availability. There also aren’t enough machines to support the number of rooms. The washing machines often back up through the floor drain. In short, the laundry room is pretty bad in this place. If you can do your laundry during the day, usually it will work out okay. Evenings can be painful.
Customer Service – There has been a lot of recent employee turnover at the hotel. The new people seem to have a better idea of what constitutes good customer service. I would grade them as “acceptable but improving."
THE WORST PROBLEM AT THIS HOTEL – Everyone who works, here, and I mean EVERYONE, is a smoker. The public smoking area is THE BENCHES IN FRONT OF THE MAIN ENTRANCE! You can almost always see employees smoking at this location, including almost every manager. Guests smoke here as well, but you are more likely to see an employee smoke here than a guest. This is disgusting, why should I have to smell their nasty smoke? Also because EVERYONE who works in this hotel is a smoker, they don’t have the olfactory acuity to sense the nasty stench of cigarette smoke in the corridors. There is a single block of rooms that are smoking rooms (third floor), however through some quirk of the ventilation system you can smell the smoke when walking in the corresponding section of the first floor (I mentioned this to one of the housekeeping staff, she told me she couldn’t smell it. I think she is the head housekeeper). Worse, if you get a third floor room on that side of the building, you have take the elevator up to the third floor and walk through the disgusting stinky third floor smoking corridor. Yuk! STAYBRIDGE MANAGEMENT – I recommend the following steps: 1) move the smoking area to the back of the building, away from any entrances, 2) put up NO SMOKING signs in the front entry and take away the ashtrays, 3) make the property 100% non-smoking; eliminate all smoking rooms, 4) going forward, only hire non-smokers. Smoking status should be immediate disqualification for employment, 5) Prohibit front desk personnel from putting up the “back in five minutes” sign in order to sneak out for a smoke, and 6) offer smoking cessation counseling to your existing employees, you will reduce sick days and health insurance costs if you can get some people to quit.
In summary, this hotel is approximately 10 years old and has not been refreshed. Customer service is okay but needs work. The hotel has a 99.9% smoking rate among its employees, which leads to a total lack of awareness of how offensive their smoking policies are to non-smokers, who are in the majority. The location is excellent which enables them to get away with the problems they have. In spite of my criticisms, the place is okay and worth consideration.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC
