For the price, the Chalet Motel is a great bargain. Most of the other lodging in the Manchester area costs 50% to 100% more, and for a one-night (two-night, if you’re pushing it) stay, the sacrifice in luxury is certainly worth the savings.
We went for a Monday during peak foliage season, and it amused us that we had virtually the entire annex to ourselves. There might have been one other vehicle there on the other side, but it was still a far cry from “No vacancy” that I’m sure other more pricey hotels were experiencing. Our double queen room was spacious, with an undersized flat screen TV well positioned to view from a last one of the beds, a large sliding glass door in the back, and good drapes on both ends to block out the light. The bathroom was functional, with one of those retrofitted shower and tub liners you see advertised on TV.
If you pull off a couple layers of the onion, you see why the price was so ‘reasonable’. Check-in was pretty drab. There was really no warm welcome or assistance to offer or do more than provide one or two traditional keys. Even the “new” annex felt dated, as if it had been built in the 1970s and not renovated since. The beds were cheap, springy, and well past their useful days. The lamp shades were coming apart, and the shower rod was hanging off the wall and unable to properly hold up the shower curtain from end to end. I saw no signs of mold or mildew, but the tiling was definitely from a few decades ago, and there was noticeably unfinished patchwork in the walls which some kid probably did using spackling paste for a few extra bucks.
Sleep quality would have been much better even on the sketchy beds if it hadn’t been for the 4 AM noise emanating from the Pepsi machine adjacent to our unit. Why the hotel needs to even keep one of these relics on the property is a mystery, but when the relic operates with 12-second on and off cycles for 15 minutes in the middle of the night, presumably for general maintenance, it becomes a genuine nuisance and huge negative in the stringent Cherry Wonderdog rating system. Similarly, the heating system in our room, which the owner admitted at check-in hadn’t been turned on all season, seemed to suffer from a skewed thermostat and a mind of its own. I had to turn it off when it kicked on in the middle of the night with a relentless amount of heat even though I had only set it for 64 degrees.
In sum, if I were to come back to Manchester, I might consider the Chalet Hotel again, but it would be so much better if they made a few simple upgrades to fix these issues beforehand.
