Sort of like writing about Facebook, it gnaws at me when I write about hotel rooms. Unlike writing about Facebook, I love writing about hotel rooms, airlines, rent cars, resorts and so forth because, if I had my teenage years to do over again, I'd have gotten a passport and a wealthy Cougar and told everyone to stick it.  I love travel, even the intrastate business kind. 

I written messages flaming and glowing to hotel managers about their facilities; I'd like to not be such a person, but I have long since accepted the fact that I am the kind of person who writes strongly-worded letters to business managers. It rarely does any good, but it makes me feel better. This is my second stay at The Country Inn and Suites on Northwest Expressway in Oklahoma City, and if there's one thing I can count on after two stays, it's that I will book a smoking room and will be rewarded with a nonsmoking room upon arrival.

Because I work for a ginormous corporation, I have to book my travel through our travel service, and the first time my booking was off, I raised hell but assumed there had been Some Kind of Mix-Up. My last encounter with TCIAS wound up with me paying a little extra - out of pocket, of course - to get upgraded to a Smoking Suite, and by "suite," I mean one room with a couch and fridge, what normal business travel hotels call "a room."  Life is too short. 

This time, it was different. I'll say up-front that TPTB at TCIAS made it right, but it took a half-hour of me waiting on hold on cell in order to get it right. I booked a single, smoking room through my company's travel service. I called the hotel in advance to ensure that smoking rooms were available, and they were. People who don't smoke wouldn't know this, but such rooms are harder to come by, and along the stretch of hotels on Northwest Expressway between Penn and Lake Hefner Parkway in OKC, there's only one hotel that I'm aware of that offers them: TCIAS. Try booking a smoking room at the Mariott, and you may as well ask them if they'll throw in an underage Thai hooker and a Cuban cigar. The drift, I assume, you get.  Anyway, as I was nearing OKC, I called the hotel to ensure that I had a reservation, and that it was for a smoking room. The first answer was: "You don't and it's not."  So, several calls, agents, and managers later, I learned that I didn't have a reservation and - still - there are no rooms in which I can partake in the vile, Satanic act of smoking. 

So, getting all huffy-puffy, I vowed my revenge, and promptly called my travel services department, and they assured me that they had indeed reserved a smoking room for me, and they even gave me one of those alpha-numeric reservation numbers to reference (mine was - and I had to cite it so many times I have it memorized - 6122SV71419 - doing a poor job of channeling Dave Barry, but I'm not making this up).  So, with that numerological sign of el diablo, I returned to the poor, $7.89/hr front desk girl who had to politely endure my rage. Putting me on hold - again - I listened to a favorite ditty of mine (Girl from Ipanema) as FDG got it worked out. After informing me that they were having server errors and then getting hit full-force with my rage, she transferred me to a manager, who promptly blamed the problem on a server and The Microsoft Corporation, and who then promptly, magically found me a smoking room. 

And proving that good things happening to bad people is only a microcosm of the larger bad things that happen to bad people, I am freezing to death in a hotel room whose thermostat will not breach - not making it up - 64.2 degrees.  At 2115, after four hours of having the theoretical heat on, I called the front desk. I explained that I was getting frostbite and - better yet - that I didn't want to change rooms. The guy at the front desk said he could come up and fiddle with the thermostat, and I politely declined, as that sounded like the kind of things that keeps losing up GOPers in the House. 

In short, I got the old "chill out" line.  I read an article in something akin to Slate or VF - sorry I can't cite it, but I'm too cold to do the research - about the decline in foreign perception of American international airports as being some weird fault of the Bush Administration. At the time, I discounted it as more piss in a powerful stream of liberal hogwash (and I'm a lover of American air travel, one of the few). Yet, transplanting what I saw then as wacky liberal paranoia into what I see now as a decline in American hotels, it does make sense. 

Frankly, each hotel stay I get under my belt comes with an increasing feeling that the hotels at large don't care about the people who actually stay in them. It's a phenomenon to me - some are better than others, the but quality of service is on the east side of the bell curve. At any business you will encounter morons, but you will also encounter people working far above their pay grade. 

My larger problem - bracketed by my fairly limited travel - is that I seem to encounter more morons than people of competence (this is not directed at TCIAS of OKC). Having worked in a large, convention hotel (Adam's Mark Tulsa) as well as having spent almost all of my twenties working in hospitality, I don't remember the service being so indifferent, so bad, so - well - clueless. My problem today - the lost reservation, the no existence of a smoking room that suddenly came into existence - could and should have been resolved in a few minutes, yet it took five phone calls and a half-hour of wait time to resolve it. I asked for nothing comped, yet I got plenty, so that was nice and unexpected. Yet it was, in two stays at said hotel, the second time it had happened. The obvious is that it's a poorly managed hotel. I would agree, except this isn't the only hotel this Keystone Kops business has happened at, and it's certainly not the most expensive. 

So, are my experiences at American hotels similar to the lack of quality in American airports viewed by select foreigners (I'd couch that by saying that having been to five foreign airports, I'll take ours, thanks), or is it reflective of a larger decline in service regarding the service industry? Food for my thoughts, at least.