Why do hotels suck?

So here I am at 2:30am blogging because I am seething about my trip this evening.  I have to be at a meeting in New Jersey around noon tomorrow, so I flew up from Florida this evening.  I flew US Air, which is not my favorite airline and had to sit three across on both legs of the flight.  So already I was not in a great mood.  I picked up my car from National Emerald Club (which is always a pleasure, best frequent rent-a-car program there is) and proceeded to the hotel (Comfort Suites) near Newark Airport that our corporate agent had reserved for me. 

I got there around 11pm, got my key and went up to the 3rd floor.  I got off the elevator and thought I walked into an ashtray.  Sure enough I go into my room and there are ashtrays on all the desks and the room smells terrible.  I refuse to put up with that, so back downstairs I go, where the front desk person insists that it is a non-smoking room.  I make him come upstairs with me and show him that non-smoking rooms have the non-smoking symbol on the door and don't have ashtrays in them and certainly don't smell like that.  Then he fesses up and tells me he knows it was a smoking room but it was all he had left.  What made him think he is going to fool me?  So I cancel my room there.

I call my Hilton Honors member number and tell them I need the closest Hilton brand near where I have to be tomorrow.  I expressly tell the clerk, I don't care which of the Hilton brands it is, just make sure it is either a king or queen bed and no smoking.  He makes a reservation at a Hampton Inn right near where I have to be tomorrow.  I drive 30 minutes there (by now it is like midnight).  I arrive at the Hampton Inn give the man my name and he says, oh yes I have your reservation.  Lucky for you, you got the last room in the house.  I say great as long as it is non-smoking.  He says sorry, it is smoking and all he has. I say give me back that credit card and out I stomp.

Across the street from the Hampton Inn is a Staybridge Suites, which is owned by Holiday Inn, but is usually not a bad place to spend a night.  I go in and get a king suite.  Get up to my room and take a few minutes unpacking and such.  I go to plug in the computer and get on line and the ethernet jack is dead. I go to call the front desk, both phones in the room are dead.  I then have to use my cell phone to call the front desk.  The man has to come up to my room and some how turn on the telephone services.  Now that is working, I plug in the ethernet cable, get an IP, but can't get out on the net.  After numerous IP release and renews, rebooting, etc., I call the tech support line and they have to reboot their server. Of course before we arrived at that conclusion, the tech support dude had to go through his entire troubleshooting guide, walking me through the finer points of how to open the control panel and such. I can now get internet, but for some reason probably due to NAT or something, cannot connect to my VPN to get Outlook mail.  Am using webmail, slow but it works.

It is now 2:45 and I am thinking there has to be a better way.  I am gold or higher at Hilton, Choice Hotels, Priority Club, Starwood, etc.  Why can't hotels get it right.  Who stays in smoking rooms anyway?  Even if I smoked, I would not want to stay in these ashtrays.  Why can't internet access at them work consistently?  Why should we have to pay extra for Internet access at hotels?  Lets do away with middle seats on planes.  Screw it, why can't we just do everything virtually and never leave our house!