Come For the Mold, Stay For the Idiocy…

In our ongoing collection of bad customer service decisions, I noted a story that was quoted on the WPXI website and later aggregated by the nice folks over at The Consumerist , about a man who was apparently blacklisted by a Motel 6 after he complained about a moldy shower curtain. If you’re like most people, your immediate reaction was probably “How skuzzy do you have to be to get on a Motel 6 blacklist?” or perhaps “Wait, Motel 6 has a blacklist? WHY?” I read the story and was transported back in time to a similar case in my personal experience – where the local management team got it right, instead…


My wife and I were on vacation and had selected a national hotel chain supposedly a few ranks above Motel 6 because they were offering a good rate and a convenient location. Everything had been reasonably satisfactory until one night when we came back to our room and discovered that the maid service had left us the most disgusting bed sheet either of us had ever seen. What on Earth they were thinking I’ll never know; the thing was stained, torn, and generally looked like the sort of sheet your mother would have thrown out without even making into dusting rags first. My gut reaction was that somebody had probably quit that day and was going out of her way to cause trouble for the management team. My wife’s reaction was that whoever was running the place had completely dropped the ball, and needed to do something about it…


We made a point of being discrete when we showed the hotel manager the sheet; he in turn was appalled, and apologized profusely for the screw-up. It probably helped that we clearly weren’t trying to scam anyone (we didn’t demand cash, a reduced bill, free room service or anything else), but the fellow clearly knew that he had a problem on his hands, and went out of his way to correct it. For the rest of our stay, he personally inspected the room everyday after the maids were done with it, and I recall getting a better rate than we had originally been quoted when we checked out – although I can’t swear to that one; it’s been a few years and my memory is getting worse. All I can tell you is that whatever he did, the lasting impression I have is of someone trying very earnestly to get it right…


Now, you and I weren’t there when the Motel 6 case went down; we don’t know for any certainty whether there was mold, how bad it was, whether the customer was an ass about things, whether the on-site manager was an ass about things, whether any effort was made to satisfy the customer’s demands, whether the customer’s demands were outrageous, or anything else. It’s possible that a business-friendly website would have told a very different side of the story from the one I found on The Consumerist. Still, it’s hard to imagine what possible good could come of leaving mold in a shower, blacklisting a customer for complaining about mold in a shower, or refusing to take that customer’s money when he actually returned to that location. Unless he was noisy, disruptive, abusive, threatening, or actually appeared to be trying to cheat the company (none of which has been alleged by Motel 6), there should have been no reason for a for-profit venture to blacklist him in the first place, let alone backpedal when called on it by the media or consumer-advocate websites…


I’m not saying that Motel 6 is racing toward the bottom any faster than any other national chain; I’m just saying that if you go you might want to bring your own Lysol…