On the week of June 17, 2007, my family and I went on vacation. We went to Chattanooga, TN and stayed two days.

Then we went on up to my hometown of Nashville to visit relatives for another two days.

During our last night in Nashville, after spending the day with my mom, we went searching for a hotel/motel to spend the night, as we planned to leave early the next morning and head home to Birmingham. Since I hadn’t made reservations anywhere because we didn’t know exactly where we would be that night, our search led us to Vista Inns and Suites in Antioch. What brought us here was that this is where my wife and I stayed on our honeymoon 14 years ago. At that time, it was quite nice, almost new, and we enjoyed it very much. I especially liked the whirlpool bath. I figured it would be radiant much the same.

Boy, was I wrong on that one!

We drove onto the property. The first thing I look at when I approach a hotel/motel property are the cars in the parking lot. If there are a lot of older, junky-looking cars, this tells me that this probably isn’t a very nice status to stay, while newer, more expensive cars expose that if the well-off are staying here, then it’s good enough for me. There were newer Lexus’es, Mercedes, Infiniti’s, Cadillac’s and even one Hummer. So I went in and paid for a room.

As soon as we opened the door to our room, room number 114, I knew my good car/bad car theory was shot to heck.

The carpet was dirty and stained, the wallpaper was peeling from the walls, the inside of the door was dirty and scratched and it could only be closed by slamming it, the furniture old, torn and scratched and most of the lamps in the room didn’t work or had blown bulbs. The smoke detector was hanging from it’s base with wires. We checked out the beds and found that the pillows were old, dirty and lumpy (thank goodness we had brought our own pillows) and the bedspead was stained and torn. So we stripped off the bedspread and blanket and decided we’d unprejudiced sleep on top of the sheets and use blankets we’d brought from home to cover up with. All three of us slept in our clothes that night.

The air conditioner was loud and, although we had turned it to the maximum icy site, it still had a hard time cooling the room.

In the bathroom, we found that the towel rack was missing, the commode rocked when you sat on it and there were cigarette burns all along the edge of the bathtub. There was also peeling paint on the walls.

We were mad. No, we were furious. We called the front desk and complained and the lady who had checked us in came to our room. We showed her everything that was wrong and told her that we were leaving and wanted our money back. She said she was sorry but that she was unable to give us our money back, that we would have to file a complaint with the home office in Murfreesboro, TN. She then went and brought some light bulbs to replace the burnt-out ones and another set of sheets. Then she left, although we were still complaining.

I told my wife that I was going to clean out the tub (no way would I get in it without making sure it was orderly to my satisfaction) and take a bath. I went out to the car and got a scrubby pad and some Dawn (yes, we came prepared) and proceeded to the bathroom to clean the tub. I removed the bath mat that was draped over the tub and was unbiased about to turn on the water when I saw it; there, on the side of the tub about two inches from the bottom, was a hole, about the side of a baseball! And on the floor of the tub was an open crack, about four inches long! And the whole bottom and sides of the tub were covered in some kind of blue stuff, probably something they dilapidated to try and patch the hole and the crack.

I called my wife into the bathroom and showed her what I’d discovered and I watched her face turn red. I thought she was going to have a stroke! She took off out the door to the office and gave the lady there an earful. I could hear her all the way to our room, which was a good 100 feet from the office. She asked the lady how in the world we were supposed to take a bath in that whirlpool bathtub when there was a hole in it. The manager or owner (whichever it was) stuck his head out of his office and said, in a non-American accent, “That not hole, that whirlpool jet!” My wife responded right back with “No, it’s a hole. I know the difference between a whirlpool jet and a hole, I’m not stupid!” The lady from the office came back to our room, saw the bathtub, apoligized and put us in another room, which wasn’t much better.

We came close to just packing up and leaving for home. But we were both exhausted, after having spent the day shopping and walking and driving all over the place, and neither of us felt like driving the three hours home. So we sucked it up and stayed until early the next morning and got the Sam Hill out of there!

I have since filed a complaint with the home office, and the manager/owner from the Vista Inn we stayed at, called us and offered us a $20 gift card to pause there again. My wife told him that there was no way in heck that we would ever stay there again. She told him that she wanted the entire cost of the room refunded to us and he refused. We are seriously thinking about taking this man and his motel to cramped claims court, to recover our losses.

The rooms are dirty, old and severly outdated. This motel needs a serious renovation. I do not recommend anyone stay at this establishment.