Beware Of Bed Bugs: Review Of Fairfield Inn Charlottesville North, Virginia

At the time of writing this review, I’ve written almost 100 hotel reviews. They’ve all taken the same format for consistency and I’ve always tried to be fair in how I’ve written them.

Even though this is a travel blog, we don’t write sponsored posts – here’s why. Two of the main reasons we don’t write sponsored posts are:

1. It gives us an opportunity to see how companies actually treat their customers/guests
2. So that we don’t feel influenced by what they might want us to write in order to get something for free.

This hotel review is going to be a little different to normal though due to one defining issue at the Fairfield Inn Charlottesville in Virginia – bed bugs. That problem was subsequently compounded by terrible service by several different members of staff. In past reviews where we haven’t had great service, I haven’t mentioned staff names as anyone can have a terrible day. That doesn’t make poor service acceptable, but I don’t want to be responsible for someone losing their job because they were stressed out about a death in their family or a looming divorce and were finding it hard that day to separate their personal life from their professional role.

In this instance though, I’ve decided to include staff names as we had some awful service and it wasn’t only one person – it was three, including the manager.

Bed Bugs

Shae always goes to bed before I do as I tend to stay up working until 2 or 3am. On our first night at this Fairfield Inn in room 103, I was working on the sofa when I suddenly saw Shae waving her flashlight around in bed at about 2:15am.

I asked her what was up and she said that she felt like she’d been bitten. Sure enough, when turning on the light, there they were – bed bugs. I took the photo of two of the bed bugs below, although a third showed up almost straight after.

I squished all three bed bugs in the sheets and they all squirted out blood on the sheets, so it seems like they enjoyed feasting on Shae before their not-so-untimely demise.

I immediately headed down to the front desk to let them know that we had bed bugs. The lady at the front desk (Bertha or Brenda) didn’t seem to believe me initially, so I showed her the photo I’d taken of the bed bugs on my phone. She then provided keys to room 215 so that we wouldn’t have to stay in room 103.

Before moving all our stuff, Shae went to check room 215 to ensure that didn’t have bed bugs too. She didn’t see any in the room, but when pulling back the sheets there were some blood spots on the mattress. These looked like they could have been from the effects of bed bug bites in the past, so we were even more creeped out.

With one room definitely having bed bugs and another room possibly having had them (and possibly still having them for all we knew), we weren’t at all keen on staying at the hotel. I did a quick search on Marriott’s website (Fairfield Inn is a Marriott brand) and saw that they had a few other hotels in Charlottesville. We’re traveling full-time with our dog Truffles, so we needed a pet-friendly property. There were a couple of Residence Inn hotels nearby, so I went back to the front desk to see if we could get moved to one of those.

Bertha/Brenda was dismissive about that possibility and simply started making keys for a third room. Knowing that Shae didn’t want to stay there, I asked when the manager would be in and was told she’d arrive at 8:30am. I figured the manager might be more amenable to moving us elsewhere, so I told her not to bother making a key for a third room seeing as that could just as easily have bed bugs too.

After heading back up to the room, Shae and I discussed what we wanted to do. She was feeling wide awake by this point due to the pain from the bites on her hand and arm (the pain and tingling continued for the next week).

Ultimately, we decided to move temporarily to the third room – room 246. We loaded up all our bags on to luggage carts, but left them on the carts in the room seeing as we intended to ask the manager to move us to a different hotel in the morning.

Shortly after arriving in room 246, Bertha/Brenda called our room to let us know we’d be getting 2,000 points for our inconvenience. In case you’re not familiar with Marriott Bonvoy points, that’s an incredibly insulting offer as 2,000 points aren’t even worth $15 based on the value you can normally expect to get from them.

To give you a better idea, the Fairfield Inn Charlottesville North is a category 3 property and so a standard free night costs 17,500 points. We were therefore being offered about 1/9 of a free night, or about 2.5 hours of a free stay. Like I said, insulting.

Eventually we were both exhausted and didn’t want to sleep on the bed, so we crashed out on the floor and couch.

The Manager

After breakfast the next morning, we met with the manager Ashley to discuss what to do. Our meeting was initially positive. She said she’d started reaching out to other hotels to see if the rate we’d booked at the Fairfield Inn could be honored at one of the Residence Inns in the area. She also offered to do a more thorough inspection of the room we were now in for bed bugs, pulling off the bed’s headboard, base boards, etc. to see if there were any there.

Shae and I already move hotels every 5-6 days on our 50 state road trip, so the prospect of moving again one night after arriving wasn’t very appealing. We were originally only due to stay 4 nights in the first place, so if we moved elsewhere it would only be for 3 nights and there was no guarantee that hotel wouldn’t have bed bugs either.

We therefore decided to take up Ashley on her offer to thoroughly inspect the room. This was done promptly and given the all clear, so in the end we chose to stay at the Fairfield Inn for the remaining three nights rather than elsewhere.

With regards to compensation, I’d mentioned to the manager that 2,000 points was a derisory offer given how little they’re worth. She said that they’d called out a third party bed bug inspector and that we could discuss compensation once the inspection had been done. She said that even if no bed bugs were found (which I knew wouldn’t be the case considering the bed bugs were sitting there squished in the sheets), she’d still offer us more than 2,000 points for our inconvenience of moving rooms.

Cleaning Issues?

Shae got chatting to one of the members of the housekeeping staff during our stay and they mentioned that they always had to work weekends (Shae had just been asking if they were up to anything nice during the upcoming weekend).

This made it seem like the hotel might be short-staffed for a couple of reasons. That impression was reinforced during our stay for a couple of reasons. First, some of the housekeeping staff seemed to be enlisted to help with breakfast in the morning. Secondly, Shae happened to be in the lobby when someone was hired on the spot to join the housekeeping team and she saw them working there the next day.

That therefore makes me wonder if cleaning at the hotel isn’t done as thoroughly as it should be due to either being short-staffed or due to new staff not knowing the ropes.

Bed Bug Inspection

We’d checked in on Monday and met with the manager Ashley on the Tuesday morning. However, we didn’t hear from her again during the rest of our stay. I sent her an email on the Thursday morning, but she never bothered to reply.

Shortly before checking out on Friday morning, I went down to the front desk to see if she was around so that I could get an update on the bed bug inspection. She said that they hadn’t been yet but that they were due to come that afternoon – after we’d checked out.

Check Out

The morning we were checking out, our toilet got blocked. Shae went down to the front desk to ask if they could send maintenance to unblock it. The person working at the front desk (Teri) asked if we really needed it unblocked seeing as we were checking out that day. When Shae said yes (it was only something like 10am at that point and check out was at 12pm), Teri rolled her eyes at Shae but told her she’d have maintenance fix it (which they did).

When checking out later on, I asked to use a few Marriott gift cards to partially pay for our stay. When hearing that I wanted to use some gift cards, Teri rolled her eyes at me too!

I’m sorry, I don’t care how bad of a day you’re having – you don’t roll your eyes at customers when they make simple requests. Rolling your eyes at one customer would be bad enough, but the fact that she rolled her eyes at both of us on separate occasions – guests who’d had bed bugs at their hotel and been bitten by them! – was completely unacceptable. You’d think they’d make an extra effort to make guests happy who’d had bed bugs, but I guess that’s not important in their (rolled) eyes.

Back To The Manager (Or Not)

Seeing as the bed bug inspector was due to check the room on the Friday afternoon, I’d hoped to hear from Ashley that afternoon but wasn’t surprised when she didn’t bother to call. I sent her an email that night, but she didn’t bother replying to that email either during the following days.

I’m not sure if they have to wait for an official report, but figured the inspector would’ve at least given them a heads up that they had indeed found bed bugs so that the room could be fumigated (or whatever needs to be done to eradicate bed bugs).

I didn’t hear from Ashley on the Monday either, so I called the hotel but was told she was on a conference call. The guy I spoke to said he’d let her know that I’d called but yet again I heard nothing the rest of the day by phone or email.

Where We Currently Stand

At the time of writing this, we paid full price for our stay that included getting bitten by bed bugs and having to deal with dismissive and, at times, downright rude staff.

Even the 2,000 points we were originally advised we’d be given hasn’t materialized. It’s now been more than a week since Shae got bitten by bed bugs at the Fairfield Inn & Suites Charlottesville North and there’s no sign of resolution in sight. I was going to hold off on publishing this review until we felt like things had been made right, but I’m not convinced that the hotel has any intention of resolving our bed bug issue. The manager – who initially seemed friendly and helpful – has been ignoring my emails and phone calls. I therefore figured I might as well post this review now and will update it if and when they bother to try to make amends for the bed bugs.

I’m also going to be writing a formal complaint to Marriott, but considering the name of their loyalty program has entered the lexicon as a term for things going terribly and there’s even a website dedicated for people who’ve been Bonvoyed, I’m not holding out too much hope for a satisfactory outcome.

Update 10/17/19

I received a call from the company that owns the hotel, but asked her to send me an email rather than discuss it over the phone so that I had everything in writing. I still hadn’t received an email a few days later, then I received another phone call. I dropped them an email myself to ask for all correspondence to be put in writing and subsequently received an email a couple of days later.

That person offered 25,000 points and a refund of our first night’s stay which seemed like a fair resolution to the issue, so we accepted that.