Clarion Inn

It was fine for a guy doing business travel. The room was fine and clean. The shower and water pressure were excellent. The overall condition of the motel was run down. My door was very hard to lock. Cig butts everywhere outside. The included breakfast was scary — the scrambled eggs were translucent with a green strip in them and EVERYTHING looked dried out and gross. I skipped.

You can’t imagine just how filthy the sofa in room 137 is. I posted a video but you can’t really see just how disgusting it is.

I don’t understand all the bad reviews. Only stayed one night. The room was large and very nice. Large refrigerator for a hotel, microwave, couch, full-​size desk is nice and outlets everywhere for charging all your devices. My wife appreciated the two sinks in the bathroom and full length mirror. Loved the shower! No crapy low-​flow shower head here. And the shower head was plenty high enough, no hitting your head on it, the taller guys know what I’m talking about. And the curved shower curtain rod is good for us bigger guys. Bed was very comfortable. Everything was clean. Very quiet, our room was in the back row. Plenty of parking for big trucks. Didn’t use the pool, but looked nice. Two pools, one indoor, one outdoor. Staff was very nice and helpful. They are pet friendly, and don’t charge extra for them. My only complaint, they have the typical free breakfast from 6 –9:30. I walked in to the restaurant at about 9:35 thinking I could just order something off the menu and pay for it and take it back to the room, since my wife was still in the shower. As soon as I walked in, the guy said they were closed. I stated to ask about ordering, and again he said, «we’re closed, sir» so I just walked out.

We were up all night with screaming drunk people in the next room. Staff said there was nothing to be done because they come from the lounge downstairs. I could move my two little girls at midnight on a subzero night. It ended when I threatened to call the police to help them figure out what to do. The woman who sits the desk is useless. A phone call to those guests might have ended it with no issue. Expect a literal nightmare all night and no refund. And some inexplicable smell. Go anywhere else.

I have been trying to find the right words to explain our stay here. Maybe, decades ago, this place was a showplace. It certainly has a lot of the features of older hotels. Multiple meeting rooms. Restaurant, bar. Indoor and outdoor pool.
But, it also has the features that, generally, cannot hide its age: Outside doors and accesses to rooms. Multiple layers of paint; each layer a little less carefully applied than the one before it.
Even under the furthest of examination, you can see that the effort to keep this old relic up, is falling to the way side. Dirty floor rugs in the check in/​check out area. Dirty windows. Tarnished metals.
It reminded me of a old pair of shoes that you stopped tying to keep polished.
Frankly, we knew nothing about the place. We bought our passage here, strictly on the basis of the pictures that we saw on the Clarion Inn website. It showed a older hotel that was being kept in pristine condition.
I, of anyone else, as much as I bitch about false advertising by restaurants (oh, you see those nice 5 foot high pictures of a Whopper in Burger King with a 2″ deep thumb hole in the middle of the top of the thing beside the cashier when you order food at one of their joints?) to have fallen for the oldest trick in the book. Bait and switch.
Just for fun and reference, I posted two of the pictures from their website for this hotel on this review. One, showing an approximation of the room we got (We ordered a King room, but were given a 2 queen room instead) and of the pool and whirlpool area.
Our room: It did have 2 beds, pictures, a nice TV, a sofa bed, tables, and a bathroom with vanity.
The carpet was filthy and worn. The sofa bed was dirty; it reminded me of a hat that someone has worn until the sweat and oil stains soak into the bill. The arm rests of this sofa bed were oily looking (we stayed away from that).
The furniture, while serviceable, was worn, and scratched. Maybe 30 years ago, it was top of the line. Meh?
The pool, was a mess, but not as much a mess as presented. There was little lighting in the outdoor pool area. The steps felt like they had algae on them. The inside pool gave no indication that the filtration unit was working. There was trash in the water. In the promotional picture, you see all of those flags? The second one, the 1776 US flag was shredded, and dry rotted (due to exposure to the heat unit). All of the windows were dirty; like they had not been cleaned in ages — you could not see out most of them clearly, like, ahem, you can in the promotional picture. See how clean the tile and grout is? It isn’t today.
Oh, and just in case anyone thinks I am a just being a cruel bastard: the morning breakfast, while simple in presentation and items offered, was excellent. Scrambled eggs, home fries, biscuits, grits, juice, milk, cereals, and bread.
Yes. This hotel is old, and it shows its age. I forgot one of the other signs of age: the roach I found and killed in the bathroom.
If it had not been so late when we arrived, and I had know of the problems early enough to have looked elsewhere, elsewhere is where we would have been.
I daresay I could go to Subway and get a sammich that is closer to the fictional ones that they show in their TV advertisements, faster, and easier, than I could get a room here, that looked anything like their promotional picture. And if you read my rambling posts here, you will know that is saying a lot.
This is a dirty hotel. No. This is a filthy hotel.
Not recommended.
Stay at your own risk.
@Removeyourhat
Edit: This is the harshest review I have ever given an establishment. This place, in my opinion, truly deserves zero stars (though I would give it a star for their breakfast). It is based on the fact that the Hotel used blatantly false pictures to represent itself. I do not know, but I suspect that this will color my viewpoint if I ever contemplate staying at another Clarion Inn unit.

Not much to say here. It was three stars. It was average. It was exactly what you would expect from a Clarion Inn in Fredericksburg. The place is a little old, but the guys at the front desk were helpful.