My mother and I stayed at Hotel 31 for 3 nights in late April 2009. We are easygoing travellers who often stay at hostels or other basic accommodations - we're aware of the high cost of hotels in NYC, and were expecting nothing more than clean and reasonably maintained accommodations. After the first night, however, we decided we had to request a new room because of the peeling wallpaper, bent venetian blinds, dirty-feeling carpet, and poor lighting.
We were moved to a new room the next night. This room was in somewhat better repair, although still quite dingy, and we were ok with it. However, when my mom woke up the next morning she had, much to our disgust, been bitten by a bedbug - there was blood on her nightie and a bite on her skin. I actually managed to capture the engorged bedbug that was crawling on her sheets and stick it to a post-it note, which I gave to the hotel manager the next morning. (It was definitely a bedbug - I have researched the subject for my work as a poverty lawyer in Vancouver.) The manager took the sample bug and said he would get an exterminator in right away and move us to yet another room. He also said that it was important to deal with this because he didn't want it getting on the internet.
We were then moved to a very nicely renovated and decorated room on a different floor, totally different in character from either of the two other rooms, which had been quite dark and dingy with poor lighting. However, in this room the telephone was not working - I checked at the front desk and they confirmed that yes, the phone was broken and there was nothing they could/would do about it. Their solution was to give my mother the keys to our original room 4 floors up (the one with broken blinds and peeling wallpaper) so that she could use the phone to call home.
The day before we checked out, we indicated we were unhappy with our experience and wanted to speak to a manager before paying our bill. No manager was present during the last 24 hours of our stay and no-one we spoke to seemed to show any concern about the various problems we had been having. So when we checked out we didn't sign for the bill and asked that they not charge our credit card until a manager had called us. We even left a note indicating they were not authorized to charge the card until they had called us, and giving our phone number.
Foolishly we did not block the credit card, and it was charged anyway and no-one ever called us! Apart from the risk of being exposed to bedbugs, this is shocking business practice and I would discourage anyone from giving this hotel their custom.
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