Holiday Inn

I am contacting you about my stay this past weekend at your Holiday Inn at 4500 Harry Hines Boulevard in Dallas. The purpose of the trip was for me to chaperone a group of high school students to an FCCLA convention nearby. At 6:50 on the morning of Friday, April 5th, my students and I headed from our rooms on the 2nd floor to the elevators to catch the shuttle bus downstairs. However, the elevators would not stop at our floor- we found out later that 2 of the three were not working. We then tried to descend by using the staircase, but the doors did not have handles to let us out of the staircase. Concerned both for my students' safety as well as our being able to make our conference meeting on time, we returned to my room and I called the front desk. They instructed me to go down the stairs and assured me they would have someone at the exit door that would let us out. Although we finally made it to our shuttle, we were late to our conference, but even more, I felt unsafe staying with my students in a hotel with such deplorable safety standards.

Upon return to work, I checked with fire personnel and my superintendent to make sure I was correct in thinking that hotels were required to have easily accessible staircases for customers to use in the case of emergency, and all were horrified by the legalities of what I described. Although I spoke to your desk about this, they told me there were no knobs on the stairway doors for "safety reasons". Therefore, I am contacting you. Our district will no longer be booking reservations at any of your hotel locations until this situation at your Dallas location has been rectified- we will not put our students in such unsafe lodgings. In addition, I would expect our bookings at your hotel to be reimbursed- I would not have booked rooms at your location if I had known we would be staying in a hotel that did not meet basic safety codes.

It is my hope that I hear back from you within the next few days and that you are able to both rectify the unsafe conditions at your Dallas location and reimburse us in full for our time at your hotel.

With concern-

Gena Inmon