The Hotel Ithaca

in good conscience recommend anyone support their business unless they make drastic changes to their operations. And even then...I'd be skeptical. I want to make this review SO much longer but there aren’t enough characters allowed in this review to outline every single way they screwed up and disappointed us. I'm not kidding, I still can hardly believe what an epically horrible job they did across the board. I’ll do my best to give the cliff notes version. 1. Rude staff. From the attitude we got during the entire block planning process, to the staff who treated my now-husband and I in particular like scum of the earth (did NOT acknowledge it was our wedding weekend, they frankly could not have cared less, meanwhile we saw then FALL ALL OVER other random guests checking in)…it was appalling. The two exceptions: the lovely woman who works the front desk overnights, and one of the women who worked our Sunday breakfast that they catered for us. They were both very nice. 2. INCOMPETENCE. The disorganization is astounding. Guests got double charged, my sister is STILL dealing with their horrible bookkeeping errors a month later, they could not for the life of them figure out how to give our welcome bags to our guests (which had important info in them like shuttle times, covid policies, etc), they tried to give my sister-in-law an upgraded room because as a single woman checking in a full day later than us she was CLEARLY the bride (Seriously??) – oh, and she works in hotels so she was LITERALLY teaching the receptionist how to use their own system because they could not figure it out. 3. FILTHY rooms. I guess it’s easy to have rooms ready for early check in when you literally do not clean them. I’m talking hair in the showers, layers of filth on the furniture…the number of DIFFERENT complaints I received from multiple different wedding guests was embarrassing. On top of that, the room we got barely had hot water or water pressure, which we thought was just a hotel issue but it turns out no, it was just our shoddy room. 4. Cheap. And by cheap I don’t meant their rooms are affordable. I mean, they assured us as the wedding couple who were bringing them THOUSANDS of dollars of business that weekend, our room would be comped. What they meant was they’d comp our room for our wedding NIGHT, not the other 2 nights we stayed there. Unbelievable. And zero upgrades. Maybe because they gave all their nice rooms to the OTHER wedding couples they hosted that weekend? (I know this because they gave us a note on a piece of scrap paper that on the other side had, oopsies, a list of hotel guest names along with their check in/out dates and associated wedding blocks. Super professional.) Oh yeah, and the entire hotel smells like pot. Like multiple elevators and multiple hallways on multiple floors. For two full days. And when we addressed it with the front desk the three staff members listening laughed and shrugged. So, yeah. There’s that. I really wish I could go into more detail of all the stress they added to our wedding for us and our guests. After taking a month-long road trip across the country staying in at least 20 hotels ranging from 2-4 stars…The Hotel Ithaca was by far the dirtiest, least welcoming, and most disorganized we came across.

had to stay elsewhere. When I called a couple days before the hold on our rooms ended I too was told the block was full, but when I later asked for a list of people who had booked I was told 3 rooms were filled (instead of the 15 we signed a contract for). At this point the wedding was only a couple weeks away and the hotel was booked full. It took almost a week of emails, calls, and an in-person visit to have the hotel agree to help cover some of our guests transportation from other hotels for the rehearsal dinner. In the week leading up to the event we again had to call multiple times and go to the hotel in person to find out what arrangements were being made, and did not get details until the day before our event. On the day of, one of our guests arrived at the hotel at 4pm and had to wait for almost an hour in the lobby because his room was not ready. The arranged shuttle picked up some guests beforehand, but after our rehearsal dinner the shuttle for ~10 of our guests did not show up. Although the woman at the front desk that night was nice and did try to offer help, she did not have any information about what company the hotel had used and did not know anything about the shuttle. We ended up having other guests help give rides. The rehearsal dinner itself was catered well. The caterer was much more responsive to questions and actually gave us a small break on the cost after the hotel block problems, but it was definitely not worth the various headaches along the way from dealing with the rooms block and reservations. Overall, working with Hotel Ithaca generated a lot of stress for us and confusion for our guests in the few weeks leading up to our wedding and if I did this again I would choose a different hotel.