Hotel renovations

First, second to Pete's post. It will never not be strange.

We stayed at Breakers Express over Father's Day for 2 nights, and it was a nightmare. Quite literally a complete 180 degree turn in terms of quality and experience from just a year ago.

And I get it; it's Breaker Express and not Breakers, but it's still a Cedar Point property. Pretty sure we will never set foot there again.

Genuinely curious what made it so bad? I find it a decent alternative when Breakers room prices are more than what I’m willing to spend for a quick overnight stay while not trying to stay in a typical Sandusky dumpy motel.

I stayed at Sawmill Creek the last two years for the media event. The rooms are the same basic level of decor you'll find in Breakers proper, but I found it to be exceptionally clean and well maintained. Great service in the bar with good top shelf stuff, half the price of Orlando parks. Granted, the occupancy was very low, but I enjoyed my stays there.

I was there once late last November. You're correct, the property is beautiful (especially how they had it decked out for Christmas) and very well maintained. I also agree with the drink assessment. Good drink and liquor selection with very reasonable prices.

I thought the food was really good too, although not quite worth the prices. Overall I was impressed though. I just viewed it as the drinks were subsidized by the food haha.

TwistedWicker77:

Genuinely curious what made it so bad?

We have always liked it as well. Plus it's right next to Thirsty Pony. Bonus.

First, we actually recognized many of the same staff from last year. They were great. You can read about how great here....just scroll down to the "Breakers Express" part

To sum it up, they were so great it inspired me to type these words:

This is going to sound beyond sappy, but I’ll just put it out there. Cedar Point is more than just a place for us, and this was an awesome reminder of how a simple gesture from the park’s employees can remind one of that.

This year, not so much. To a person, the entire staff behind the desk seemed utterly disinterested and even somewhat annoyed that we were checking in. I don't expect a lot, either, but at least a smile and a positive attitude. And we were the only ones in the lobby at the time. I even tried to interject with a "hey I remember you from last year; we are back celebrating our anniversary again".

The reaction:

But whatever. Maybe they are just having a bad day. I'll just sum up the other highlights. We were staying for three nights.

• Girls wanted to swim in the pool after visiting the park. Of course. It's actually a nice little pool setup in the courtyard. And it's heated, so even if it's not hot and humid it's still relaxing. Only someone forgot to turn the heat on. All three nights. So the dips in the pool were, to say the least, very brief.
• After getting back for night two, we found out the hotel had run out of towels. Not expecting this (because why would you) we had ditched our towels from night one. No big deal, they just said to keep checking. Which we did (along with a line of other guests), but eventually we were told to get towels from the pool. A "van was on its way" with new towels. Well apparently that van was coming from Knott's Berry Farm because it never made it there during our stay.
• The furniture in the room looked really beat up; like it was just brought in from a local Goodwill store and then tossed around a few times before being set into place.
• The hotel was absolutely inundated with teams from the nearby Sports complex. Pretty sure one room down the hall was throwing a rave with about 30 kids packed into the place, and packs of completely unsupervised kids running around every possible inch of the place. Lots of calls to the front desk, but man; where were the coaches and/or parents? This was the most off-putting part of the experience. I'm not exaggerating when it sounded and felt like a circus in the halls and outside around the pool.

Maybe that's why the front desk staff was not happy.

And look, any of these things in and of themselves are things that happen (aside from the towel thing; how does a hotel run out of towels for two days), but when they all happen at once it just leaves a less-than-awesome aftertaste.

Saying we will "never set foot there again" may be a bit harsh, but we didn't even look it up for our upcoming trip this week.

How does a hotel not have towels?!

Perplexing, right? I've never worked in a hotel but don't they all have their own giant washers-dryers, etc.?

And where did the van go...

At Winter Chill Out 2023 we toured the laundry facilities at Cedar Point.
Our tour guide said they handle the laundry for all the CP hotels.

KevinJ that is definitely a bad experience to say the least. The towel situation is very wild to me. I also have encountered many of the sports teams being loud in the hallways and in neighboring rooms before too at Express. I guess I have just always looked past it, but annoying to say the least.

I have noticed a lot of things this year just seem extremely off even beyond the accommodations aspect, and it makes me wonder if this is the direction that things will be going. Will this be a new norm until we get some head management in there to set some better precedences? I do not even have an answer.

A lot of noise is made about the staffing issues with line-level employees, but I'm sure it's worse when it comes to line managers, the people who supervise them. If there isn't a strong group there, **** rolls down hill. If I had to guess, that's what's going on here. I know one former manager who left and went back to retail, as a perfect example of this problem.

If I'm not mistaken, during the laundry tour at WCO they said that Express and Sawmill have their own laundry facilities which are opened seasonally with the main facility being open year round. I wonder if they aren't staffing the smaller facilites and depening fully on the main facility and/or vans coming in (or not) from California.

Seeing as Kevinj described the property being over-run by the rowdy, unsupervised ball team youth, I wonder if the towel situation was exacerbated by their presence. That is to say perhaps they snatched up every last towel for their own use maybe even pilfering a few along the way.

Someone here needs to step up and do some undercover investigative reporting to get to the bottom of this towel situation.
CP is currently hiring for linens & laundry and hotel housekeeping...
I'd do it myself, but I'm allergic to manual labor.

Teams full of youths stealing towels. Those might need some extra cleaning.

Perhaps they used a number of towels from Express Hotel to be available in the Giant Wheel gondolas 🤔