Fort Myers Isn't Cheap!
Written: Mar 07 '06 (Updated Mar 09 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: It has a good restaurant, clean rooms, and is near several chain restaurants.
Cons: The price is not at the same level as the hotel's quality.
The Bottom Line: If you must stay in this area of Fort Myers, check out other hotels first.
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| philmils's Full Review: Clarion Hotel, Fort Myers |
When you stay in multiple locations of a hotel chain, you usually get to know what to expect in most locations for that chain. I find that to be generally true with the Clarion chain. I find them to be on the upper end of budget hotels with pretensions of better. Usually, the rooms are average or a little small, but nice and well maintained. The Fort Myers, Florida, Clarion Hotel doesn't fit that mold. I'm not sure what mold formed it.
If you are going to stay in this hotel, make your reservations early. Many airline crew members stay here and they already know what to request. When you make your reservation, you may be asked if you want to stay in the garden section or the tower. If you are not asked, state that you would prefer a room in the tower and as high as possible. I requested that and got a top floor room overlooking a quiet residential neighborhood. There is more to this than you might suspect.
The Fort Myers Clarion Hotel is on the very busy Highway 41 (also known as Cleveland Avenue). The five-story "tower" is set back very little from the road - almost all parking is behind the hotel. The "garden" section is an old two-story motel with the exterior walkways and is set back a little further, but has the outdoor bar near it. The best way to escape the noise is to be on the back side of the hotel or high in the tower. The tower is newer than the garden section and in a little better condition. Also, the rooms are slightly larger in the tower. Security is better in the tower since the only ways to get in to it is past the desk or through a locked door that can be unlocked with your room key.
Do not make a reservation at this hotel unless you have a good medic standing ready to assist. For my very early March 2006 stay, I paid a discounted nightly rate of $152, plus taxes. The rates I have seen on the Internet and on the back of the door are higher. No, it isn't on or even near the beach. So much for being a budget hotel, even on the upper end!
This Clarion claims to offer free transportation to and from the airport. They do, but you may not want to count on it. When I made my reservation, I asked about the availability of such service. I was told it was available, but that it was mostly for airline crews. I was advised by the hotel to call the night before to make a reservation for the van and to let them know which flight I would be using. The night before I flew, I did that, including giving them the time the flight would arrive and the time I would be ready for the ride. The woman at the hotel who took the call said she took down the information and would plan to meet me, but that I should call again once I arrived at the airport. I did that, too, and 5 minutes before I said I would be available for the ride to the hotel. I was told I would have to wait at least an hour and a half before they could pick me up. Some of the others at my meeting had similar experiences, but it was not consistent. I shared a taxi van to the hotel with some friends who came along after I had waited an hour. They were told they would have at least a 45-minute wait. The flat fee to the hotel was twenty dollars (plus tip) for up to three people.
Before I leave the subject of transportation, I should mention that the experience trying to go back to the airport was not without incident. On Friday morning, I tried to make a reservation through the front desk for the 6:10 am shuttle run to the airport. I was told it was full. I could see that she had six people down for the ride and I did not know the capacity of the van. Saturday afternoon, I checked again through a different person at the front desk. I saw that the same six people (all with one airline) were scheduled, but the clerk said there was room for one more, so he added me to the list. When I arrived at the front desk on Sunday morning, another person had been added to the list. We had plenty of room in the van and even had a couple of empty seats. The lesson learned is that if one person says the van is full, simply try another person.
After all that about the transportation, I should mention a little something about the hotel.
The lobby is not large. Of course, there is a front desk. You'll also find a few chairs, tables, and very colorful arrangements of artificial flowers that need dusting. As you enter the front door, you will find on the back side of the lobby an area for the free breakfast (microwave-ready pancakes and French toast, small muffins, bagels, juice, coffee, and hot water for tea. Only forks and spoons were available individually. Knives could be had only in packaged sets.). Off to the right is the restaurant (more on that later). Off to the left after passing the desk is a hall/reception area for the meeting rooms and the way to the tower. That reception area makes for a good overflow area for the lobby. The garden section is out the front door, past the restaurant, and back behind the outdoor bar. There was nothing outstanding about the lobby.
The hotel does offer a swimming pool (outdoor) and exercise room (indoor). I never saw the swimming pool, but have been told by others at the meeting that it does exist. I briefly glimpsed through the window in the door of the exercise room and saw three pieces of equipment. I believe it was two treadmills and one stationary bike.
On the hotel's web site, they claim to have bellmen. I suppose that means that someone behind the desk might be willing to help you with your bags, should you ask. They certainly had no one obvious and ready for the job.
The two elevators in the tower are slow and not very reliable. When I wanted to check out and leave, I got on at the fifth floor and pushed the ground floor button. The doors closed and then nothing happened. I checked to make sure the button was lit, pushed it again, and still no response. I added the second floor to list of desired stops and still no movement. There was a door open button (but not a door close button), so I pushed it. Fortunately, the doors opened. I got out and pushed the elevator call button again. The other elevator immediately opened its doors. I got on this second elevator and the first elevator beat me to the ground floor.
The meeting rooms are adequate for most events. Most of it is one large room with multiple configurations based on movable walls. They claim the entire room can hold up to 600 people with theater seating. We used only one small section. For our first night, we had an order for coffee that never showed up. To be fair, we didn't start until well after dinner and after most workers had gone home. Fortunately, the hotel offers coffee in the lobby. Well, that is the claim. We found three urns, one filled with regular coffee, one with decaf, and the third with water for tea. The decaf and water were room temperature and the regular coffee was comfortably warm enough to drink. On other days, beverages and some rather sad pastries were delivered. I didn't book the meeting rooms, so I have no idea what they may cost.
We also ran into a small problem with meeting room assignment. The room assignments on the lobby meeting schedule board and at the front desk didn't match the signs at the doors of the meeting rooms. When the front desk made a call to someone to find out what was correct, the signs at the doors won out.
There are several eateries within walking distance of the hotel, but you must cross the very busy highway to get to most. Please use a crosswalk at a traffic light. The traffic is far too dense to do otherwise. Also within walking distance are a grocery, pharmacy, banks, various small offices, and a tattoo parlor. This is not an upscale neighborhood, but it isn't bad.
The Fort Myers Clarion does have a very popular steak house on the premises. That is Sam Seltzer's Steakhouse. I only ate there once, but wish I had eaten there more often. At 6:30 pm, we had a 25-minute wait for a table. This is a large restaurant, but it does attract a lot of locals, so the place fills quickly. One of the featured items on the menu is the prime rib in three sizes. The 8-ounce prime rib is $13.95, the one-pound is $16.95, and I don't remember the price on the two-pound prime rib, but I believe it was about $21.95. This came with a salad or soup (don't like split pea, which was the soup that day, so I took the salad), choice of potatoes (I took mine mashed with garlic), and a choice of vegetable (I took broccoli). Together with iced tea and tax, the bill for my one-pound prime rib dinner came to a little over twenty dollars, plus tip. We had a great waiter (thanks, Adam!) and the food was rather good, but far from the best I've had. My medium-rare prime rib was a little over-cooked, but still presentable. They offered a choice of grated raw horseradish (yes!) or in a cream version.
Access to the rooms was easy using the plastic card keys, although I did have to get them to reprogram the keys the morning of my second day of stay. I had gone down to the lobby for breakfast and, on my return, the keys no longer worked. The guest rooms are a little larger than most. My room had a king bed (not very comfortable, but enough so), two nightstands, a side table, an arm chair, two side chairs, a table/desk with ample stationary and books and menus about the hotel, a large armoire (with drawers) for the television (about 25-inch RCA color receiving 28 channels), and a stand for the refrigerator (Frostman refrigerator/freezer of about four cubic feet) and ice bucket (nice double-walled frosted plastic) with two glasses and a tray. If the side table and arm chair were removed, I believe there would be enough room for another king bed. Each table or stand had a table lamp. All light sockets held florescent bulbs. One of the sockets had been pulled out of place and was hanging by the power cord. Fortunately, it was easy to put back in place.
One wall came complete with a fist-sized hole at about shoulder height. Each of the three pillows on the bed was rather thin - maybe four inches thick. The closet was a small doorless area with a horizontal pole, ironing board, iron, and folding suitcase stand.
The clock radio did an excellent job of picking up static. On full volume, it was enough to wake me (barely!) when the alarm went off. I requested a wake-up call for my first morning. It never came. They came through with proper calls on all the other days.
Speaking of requests, I had a need to use my room for rest (meetings went well into the night) in the afternoon of one day. So I wouldn't be disturbed by the maid, but still get the rooms serviced, I called housekeeping to get the room serviced. The front desk answered. My room was serviced 25 minutes later. I mention this partly because of what happened with another person in the meeting. He arrived at 11:30 on the second day of the meetings and tried to check in. He had requested early check-in. Check in time is 4:00 pm and check-out time is noon. The front desk told him a room would be ready in less than 20 minutes. He checked back frequently, but still had to wait three hours to get into a ground floor room facing the busy highway. Maids do need time to service the rooms, but not that much. I also can understand that the maids would logically service the rooms being vacated first to prepare them for the incoming guests, but that goes against his experience the next morning. It seems the maid showed up at 8:00 am to service his room. He immediately vacated the room to permit her to service it. I was in the meeting room at the time. Shortly after he arrived in the meeting room, I had to return to my room for something I had forgotten. In the hall was the maid with her cart knocking on his door to get in - she had not started on the cleaning. With both her and the cart in the hall, it was difficult to get by, but I did manage to squeeze through. As I did so, I mentioned that he was in a meeting room and not in the guest room. She turned, stared at me with her mouth agape, and didn't move the cart when she saw I wanted to get by. I repeated my message to her and she returned to knocking on the door. She was still knocking on the door once the elevator arrived to take me to my floor.
Let's return to the guest room. It was clean. The wall tile around the bathtub showed a lot of age and, where a few tiles had been replaced, the tiles didn't match. The bathroom was of adequate size and came complete with a large mirror, bathtub/shower with a cheap shower curtain that took too much room, a toilet, a counter with a wash basin, hair dryer, coffee maker (and coffee, of course), and toiletries. The toiletries consisted of a shoe buffing cloth, a boxed shower cap, two bars of soap, and one each of shampoo, mouth wash, conditioner, and body lotion. There was also a box of tissues available and two rolls of toilet paper. Normally, I like a lot of water in the toilet, but the water level in this toilet was a little high. Gentlemen - even those with no bragging rights - come equipped to be able to detect high water levels in toilets and the water level in this toilet was a little high. Very young boys have to wait until they further develop this ability. On the subject of water, I should mention that the bath/shower water was warm enough to use, but only by turning it to the hottest setting.
The room came equipped with two telephones - one bedside and the other on the table/desk. Each telephone had access to the same two lines. I am not the only one who had problems getting the telephones to work on my first day in the room. It took a lot of random button pushing to get to a dial tone that would disappear after I hung up, only to need more button pushing to get it back again. After several tries, they finally resorted to being properly functioning telephones. Somewhere on the telephones is probably a jack for the high-speed Internet access they claim to offer for free. I saw nothing but a standard phone jack and made no attempts to access the Internet. By the way, the meeting rooms also offer wireless access. I looked for the charge rates for the telephones (how much is a local call?), but never found them.
For those who are traveling with a few children and need two rooms, my room had a door connecting to the next room. By the way, they offer both smoking rooms and non-smoking rooms. I had a non-smoking room, which is what I requested since my sinuses tend to act up in the presence of smoke. Many hotels put all the smoking rooms on floors containing only smoking rooms. This hotel put each floor half and half and put an ash can in the hall near the elevator. I guess they don't realize that the fumes easily go from one room to another. I believe that had a little something to do with my difficulty in sleeping each night.
The air conditioning unit sat under the non-opening window. It was on the entire time I was there and was a little noisy. At least that created a white noise to drown out most other noises. It wasn't enough for when a (college?) baseball team came in during the late evening hours making a lot of noise. The air conditioning unit was also under the drapes. I had to use the two telephone books to hold the drapes down so all the cool air would be pushed only behind the drapes.
The room's only window was wall-to-wall. It started about two feet above the floor and ran to within a couple of inches of the ceiling. Two sets of drapes covered the window. One was a set of shears and the others were blackout drapes. Both sets worked well, except with the air conditioner problem. My fifth-floor back lot view was over the back parking lot and a quiet residential neighborhood of small, inexpensive detached houses, mostly fairly well maintained.
For all the negatives I have mentioned, the hotel could be worse. The real complaints I had were the price and the airport shuttle. Although the price was at about the same level as other hotels in the area, I feel a fair price for this quality and location would have been about $79 each night. I suspect the hotels in the area are not trying to be all that competitive. The service at the front desk was inconsistent, but that can be corrected. If I needed to return to this section of Fort Myers again, I would look into other hotels first. The only really good thing connected with the hotel was the good, but inexpensive, restaurant. Maybe you want to eat there and stay somewhere else.
Recommended:
No
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philmils
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Location: Sterling, Virginia, USA
Reviews written: 39
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