Passes & Canyons Blog

The OFMC headed out on our annual summer trip recently and this year we stayed mostly in Colorado. Whenever we’re in Colorado I always have my thoughts focused on additional information I can pick up to add to the www.motorcyclecolorado.com website. One major category of interest is my Biker-Friendly Motels and Hotels page.

I’m always divided on what to include on that page. Should I only list places that I would recommend? Or should I list any place I have information about and spell out the bad with the good? After all, warning someone away from a bad place is at least as helpful as pointing them to a good place.

That dilemma arose on this last trip because of a bad experience we had in Gunnison, at the Super 8. Now, the Super 8 in Gunnison seems to do very good business with bikers. There were 6 of us there and there were 31 with another group, as well as several other smaller groups. And when we were checking in the lady at the desk made a point to offer us rags to use to clean our bikes. All in all I would have to classify them as biker-friendly.

In our case, though, they were not guest-friendly. I’ll just lay the thing out chronologically.

We make our plans for the trip well in advance, so it was several months ago that I called to arrange for one room with three beds and another with two beds. I spoke to some guy who spoke clear, normal English. Then one of our guys decided he would not be with us in Gunnison so I called back to change that to one room with three beds plus a rollaway. The woman I spoke to was not a native English speaker and communicating with her was hard but we got the job done.

Then, a few days before we were set to leave, I was told two more guys would be with us in Gunnison after all, so I called and arranged for a second room with two beds. Again I got the woman who I had trouble communicating with but we got it handled.

On the day we were headed to Gunnison we discussed the arrangements and someone suggested that maybe we should just switch to three rooms with two beds each so no one would need to sleep on a rollaway. We knew it would cost a bit more but it sounded like a good idea. So when we got there I asked if that would be possible, but it was the same woman I had spoken with on the phone and if anything, communicating face to face was harder than on the phone. Beyond getting the absolute basics nailed down I gave up trying to understand anything else she was telling me.

Well, it turned out that the other things she was telling me were that since we wanted to make this change she would need to just delete our previous reservation for one of the rooms and create a new reservation for the two. And apparently the prices had gone up in the interim and we would have to pay the higher price. When we’re on the trip we each pay for rooms and even it out in the end, so I had already paid for one and left the desk when this came to Bill’s attention. He argued that that was inappropriate but she wouldn’t budge. We suspect, frankly, that they use corporate Super 8 software and she just didn’t know how to override its defaults, so she did the only thing she could do, which was to cancel and rebook.

So here we were at the Super 8 paying, with tax, $108 for one room and $135 apiece for two other, identical rooms. Now, I don’t know about you, but $135 for a room at the Super 8 strikes me as pretty dang pricey. Especially when there was another motel right next door with vacancies running, per their website, $45 to $110 per night. Bill went ahead and paid but none of us were happy about it. Of course if we had just canceled it all and gone next door they could have stuck us with the late cancellation fee.

And then later we noticed they had a sign out front that said “Special Walk-In Rates.” So like, $135 a night is less–or is it more–than their normal rate? We did qualify for the walk-in rate, didn’t we?

I hoped the next morning to find someone else at the desk who I could talk with who spoke better English but no dice. Same woman. I mean, she personally was a very nice person, smiling and friendly, but charging us the higher price just seems wrong. Add to that the fact that there were comparable but cheaper places close at hand, I can only conclude that there is no reason to stay at the Super 8 in Gunnison. Even if they are biker-friendly.

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