Logan Ramsey
Associate Editor
At the beginning of November, I booked a room at the Mountain Valley Inn when I was in Missoula and ever since then, I’ve had a hellish experience trying to get my room refunded.
If I had read a single review, I would’ve been warned against staying there, but I decided a two-star motel would be fine. The reviews that I’ve now read have stories of hair covering the bathroom floors, bloodstains in the carpet and a double homicide on the premise and I would’ve avoided the entire ordeal if I’d read just one review.
The motel looked fine at first to me, but my girlfriend, Lyssa, was immediately nervous looking at the people roaming the premise. I thought everything would be fine once we got to the room.
They gave us a key to the room and everything looked normal to me at first. Lyssa was tired so she immediately went and laid down. The first thing that was wrong with the room that I noticed was that there wasn’t any soap. Not a big deal. I went down to the front desk, got some soap and came back. Then, Lyssa showed me that the pillows had black speckled stains on the corners. Who knows what those were from. I went back to the front desk and got new pillows, but really, I should’ve known that we couldn’t stay there just from that. When I get back to the room again, Lyssa lifts the blanket and showed me that she’d discovered pee stains all over the sheets.
You read that right. There were at least five large stains all over the white bed sheets. At that point I knew we couldn’t stay at the motel, so I got all of our bags in the car and went to the front desk to inform them we were leaving and we’d like a refund, and to cancel the reservation I had mistakenly made on Priceline before booking my room.
I had messed up earlier and made a reservation for November 17 and we were there on the 3rd, so I asked them to cancel that reservation and they said that was something they could do, and would do. I even called to confirm later. Little did I know that you have to cancel a reservation made through Priceline by calling Priceline customer service, but that wasn’t something the motel’s employee’s thought was important to tell me, so now I have been charged $67 for a room that I was told was cancelled.
They later told me after I left the motel and was back in Pocatello that the refund would take 15 days to process. I thought that was fishy, but I called my credit union and they said that was legit, and that the refund for the room would be processed.
I now realize that management never intended to give me a refund, when they explicitly told me they would. After I saw that the room that I thought was cancelled had been charged to my account, and I hadn’t received my refund, I called the motel ready to give them hell and received some shocking news.
The person who was now answering the phone had only been there for a week, along with the entire rest of the motel staff, because the owner had gone through and “gutted” the entire motel, getting rid of every employee who had worked there when I had my nightmare experience.
I explained my situation to the new staff member, and I had another chance to get my room refunded, but I now know that they can’t do anything about my reservation, because they have no control over that. I have to call Priceline itself and try to get the refund, and I’ve been told the process could take over a month, and it could likely take 15 days to get my first room refunded for the full $50 they charged, and I may not get any of that money back.
The moral of the story is, always read reviews for motels.
