We give the Peery Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City an F for customer service!

Our good friends had planned a nice four-day, relaxing stay together at the historic Peery Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City to celebrate the end of another college semester.

They parked their car with the Peery Hotel valet on Wednesday night. On Thursday night they got a call asking if they had moved their car because the valet operators couldn’t find it.

Turns out, their car was stolen!

What awful news to receive while enjoying some rest and relaxation with your spouse.

What makes the news even harder to swallow is the hotel’s response.

No one would apologize for what happened so as not to assume liability for it.

They were initially told they’d still have to PAY FOR VALET when they checked out.

They were told it wasn’t the hotel’s fault, and that the hotel could not do anything to compensate them.

No complimentary hotel room.

No offer to pay for, or even arrange for, a rental car.

No sympathy whatsoever!

The hotel staff eventually gave-in on charging for valet and returned the keys to our friends, but only after a fight.

What happened to hospitality at Peery Hotel?

If you were running a hotel, would you treat your guests like this in a time of crisis and personal loss?

If you were a guest at a hotel where your valet parked car was stolen, would you feel the hotel and/or the valet operators had some responsibility for what happened?

In this instance, it’s most likely the valet didn’t lock the doors (the car had manual locks) and a car thief helped himself to the unlocked car, jump started it and took off.

Unfortunately the car contained hundreds of dollars of college text books and some valuable personal belongings. Not to mention the car insurance and registration documentation that could lead to identity theft.

Explanations given to our friends were very weak and only passed the buck. Our friends were basically told it was their own fault their car was stolen from the hotel’s valet lot — which, by the way, is the SAME LOT as the self-park lot; it just costs $5 more a day to have someone else park there for you. Lame!

No one at Peery Hotel would accept responsibility for what happened or offer to make our friends’ stay more pleasant.

This, my friends, is no way to treat hotel guests!

Instead of enjoying a few days in downtown Salt Lake, our friends got to make phone calls to family members, police, insurance representatives, lawyers and credit bureaus. And they got to walk everywhere they went, part of the time in a rainstorm, and figure out how in the world they’re going to get back home to Springville later today.

What You Can Do

Help us spread the word and express our distaste for how the Peery Hotel handled this most unfortunate situation.

The only email contact information we could find on the hotel’s website is for a jhinks at the hotel’s corporate office (Jolie Quest).

Let’s email the hotel’s point person and let them know what we think!

Email address: jhinks@joliequest.com

Perhaps some bad publicity will help them wake up and smell the burned coffee, so-to-speak.