A Letter to Chris Dolce on a Recent Stay at the Dolce Tarrytown House

For a family wedding, many of my family and friends spent a few nights at the Dolce Tarrytown House on Memorial Weekend, 2001. We had arranged in advance several wedding-related activities, including a rehearsal dinner on Friday night and a family brunch on Sunday morning. Although all individual staff members we encountered were extremely helpful and courteous, going out of their way to get us anything we needed, we did encounter many unfortunate problems with the hotel which we would like to bring to your attention.

1. The bathtubs in rooms 109 and 128 were not lined with rubber mats, and consequently they were dangerously slippery, especially upon first entering.
2. Room 128 was supposedly a non-smoking room, but a partially smoked cigarette was found inside one of their dresser drawers.
3. Room 128 had hair inside the bathroom sink and all along the bathroom counter upon checking in.
4. Furthermore, room 128 had a chest of drawers inside the sliding-door closet, but the chest of drawers was inaccessible unless one forced the sliding doors open all the way, with great effort, every time one wanted to use the dresser.
5. On the second day (Saturday) of our stay, three different members of our party (in rooms 109, 128, and 139) at different points in the day (respectively at approximately 3pm, 11:30pm, and 1pm) found out that our room keys had been deactivated, even though we were not due to check out until Monday. In my case, I was told that no one was available to bring me a new room key, and that I needed to go to the front desk and wait for the manager to make a new key for me. In the case of my elderly aunts (room 139), they were left sitting in the hall outside their room until someone finally delivered a new key to them.
6. Several people in our party experienced problems with their rooms not being made up promptly, even when completely vacant: my aunts left their room at 9am and when they were finally let back in at 1pm, with the new key, their room was still not made up; my parents left their room at 10am and when they returned at 3pm they had to make a special call to the front desk to get someone to make up their room.
7. Every person in our party, in many different rooms in different buildings, experienced terrible, unwatchable, television reception. Both cable and broadcast channels, from CBS to HBO, came in with terrible lines and static and thus we were unable to enjoy any entertainment in our rooms. After a complaint from room 127, the front desk said they would send someone to look into the reception problems, but no one ever got back to us.
8. The driving directions on your website in the “When coming from Connecticut” section were misleading and debateably incomplete: They directed us to take Exit 9 at one point, without noting that the first Exit 9 that we encounter will in fact be the wrong one, and that we must go another ten miles until the exits count down to 1, and then immediately start renumbering themselves to 9 again, before taking the second Exit 9. This seems like something worth mentioning, since at least several other guests we spoke with this weekend also ran into the same problem and were quite confused on their way to the Tarrytown House.
9. Generally, the hotel did not have the modern conveniences we’ve come to expect from hotels in this price range nowadays: rooms 109 and 128, at least, did not have a sink outside the bathroom, which is usually standard; nor did any of the televisions in the rooms have a yellow video-in port, to allow someone to connect a video game controller or a digital camera or a VCR to the (otherwise unwatchable) TVs.
10. By far the largest issue for us, however, was the complete lack of handicapped accessibility. We had several older women in our party who were very uncomfortable with the amount of stairs, as well as a few younger people with knee injuries, all of whom regretted the large amount of steps. There was simply no way for my aunts to get from their room to breakfast without using the stairs, much less to the pool area, and at check-in, the lack of very close drop-off points, as well as the lack of elevators, made moving in our luggage extremely inconvenient.