Pros:Ultimately, the Melissas (plural) met with conference organizers and expressed their own dissatisfaction with the handling of the room mixup. The hotel mgmt is trying, but they need work. All said and done the conference has been a great success accomplished by an amazing conference committee and an evolving hotel mgmt team.
Cons:My colleague booked a double queen room months in advance. On the day of checkin, the hotel management asked my colleague to switch from the double queen to a single room. My colleague accepted the offer, not knowing he'd end up needing the double, and was checked into room 227. I am also attending the conference but had initially planed to arrive a day later. On arrival I asked if I could check in a day early but was unable to due to availability of rooms. Accepting that my reservation was not until the following day, my colleague and I chose to share his room and were given additional bedding to facilitate making a bed on the floor (this hotel doesn't have cots!). The bedding (can't make this up) arrived in the room and we then left to go take a walk around Spokane. After a nice walk we had dinner in the hotel restaurant. The service was terrible (waiter consistently failed to check on us and we finally resorted to placing our orders with runners) but the food was good. After dinner I went back to our room while my colleague caught up with some fellow conference organizers. While in the room, another hotel staff member came by to let me know that there was a problem with the hotel room. I informed them that the room was in another party's name and that I'd inform him. Five minutes later I'd located my colleague in the hotel. We went to the hotel office and spoke with the hotel staff member who informed us that our room was not registered to us and that we'd need to "wait in line and get another room." This made no sense as we had checked in, had keys to the room issued in a envelope with "227" written on it, and had received extra bedding (!!!), from the checkin staff, delivered to our room hours before. The staff member returned to the hotel office to try to figure this out. It was at this time that it became clear that the staff member had also called security to evict us from the room. After several minutes, another staff member, the one who'd checked us in earlier, then returned and began to work on the problem. We waited several more minutes while security watched over us as though we were criminals. The second staff member finally figured out that somehow we should have been checked into room 237 but instead we're given keys to 227. They then helped us move our luggage (and extra bedding!!) to room 237. All said and done, this recap can only begin express how wildly unpleasant and unprofessional an experience this has been. I didn't record in the above description any of the dialogue so will sum that up here. Over the course of 20 minutes we were informed on multiple occasions that we were not checked into the hotel and that we were trespassing. We were told to wait in line at checkin, a complete mess in its own right, to get another room, by a staff member that had earlier in the day said that no additional rooms were available. And we had security inform us that we were trespassing and that he'd been called to remove us. The staf