I’ve stayed at this Holiday Inn more than any other hotel in Lafayette, but not by choice. Most of my business trips to Lafayette were to conduct 401(k) education workshops for the employees of a large offshore drilling company, and the client always chose this hotel’s meeting facilities to host the workshops. After about 15 trips to this hotel, I became very familiar with the property, including its shortcomings, which, unfortunately, there were many of.
My biggest complaint about this Holiday Inn is the persistent problem with air conditioning that exists in many of the guestrooms. This is not an isolated problem, as on every stay here over two years, at least one (if not more) people from my company ended up with a room with a broken air conditioner. With two or three employees on each trip, we stayed in a wide variety of rooms, so this problem was apparently not limited to just a few rooms. And, because the hotel was almost always full when we stayed there, it was usually impossible to change to a different room. Suffering through a warm, humid Louisiana night in a room with a broken air conditioner is not pleasant, especially when you have to get up early the next morning and teach a four-hour workshop to 100 people. The hotel employees were also consistently difficult to deal with regarding this problem, and requests for a reduction in room rate or free night usually fell on deaf ears. The employees and management usually seemed annoyed with the complaints and had a "just deal with it and shut up and leave me alone" attitude, like they were tired of hearing about the air conditioning problem.
Another issue I had with this Holiday Inn was cleanliness. I never stayed in a room that was filthy, but not once did I have one that was extremely clean either. Usually the housekeeping problems related to overlooked details, such as a trash can that had not been emptied, a dirty coffee maker, or, in one case, a table that where the previous guest had obviously spilled a soft drink that was very sticky. On one visit, the housekeeper apparently forgot to stock my room with towels; when I arrived there was not a single towel or washcloth in the room and it took three calls to the front desk to have towels delivered to the room. Like the air conditioning problem, these issues seemed to come up on virtually every stay.
Personally, I would not choose to stay at this hotel again. Had I stayed there only once, I would have considered it an unlucky bad experience. However, the persistent nature of these problems over several years and many visits indicates to me that the hotel’s management is not committed to the property’s upkeep. There are much better choices in town that do not have these problems.