New Jersey Shore, Wildwood New England Motel

My husband and I went to the Wildwood New England motel, 07/2005.. We chose this place as this is a pet friendly motel. My dogs were very hot as the air conditioning unit in the rear of the motel was barely working and would not keep the tv area cool , so the dogs had to stay towards the back. The average temp was 78-80 degrees in the tv area. The owners would not get us a fan, they just said they couldn't find it. Even though we explained to them that our dogs do not tolerate heat well and could die ( we have bulldogs).

August 2005

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We stayed at the New England Motel in North Wildwood, New Jersey recently, because it's "pet friendly" (accepts pets).

Unfortunately, it's NOT "HUMAN friendly."

If you do NOT have pets, there's ABSOLUTELY NO reason to stay here.

While we had a good time on our vacation, it was NOT because of the owners of the New England Motel.

I am very suspicious about the first 4 reviews on this site. They seem like "ads" from people connected with the motel.

My experience was much more similar to the 5th review on this site. That ENTIRE review, written by SOMEONE ELSE, can be found at:

http://www.reviewcentre.com/review131893.html

Before I get started, I want to say that we had been to Wildwood previously, before we had a pet, and stayed at a NON-pet friendly mom & pop motel typical of the Wildwoods, and had no such problems as we had at the New England.

We did NOT have HIGH EXPECTATIONS going in to our stay at the New England.

Anyway, we found the owners, to be completely UN-hospitable & UN-friendly, and on several occasions downright unhelpful.

I could only find 4-5 PET FRIENDLY motels in all of the WILDWOODS (Wildwood, North Wildwood, Wildwood Crest), and I think the owners are well aware of this fact. In turn, they don't have much motivation to be nice to guests, since guests have few other options.

As an example, we were so unhappy on the first day of our stay, that we went to look at another pet friendly motel nearby, but they did not have a room available for all the days we needed.

1. One time, when my son and his friend returned from the beach and they were already heading to the hose to clean the sand off their feet were told by one of the owners, "I don't want to see one grain of sand in the pool."

2. The "bath towels" are tiny & rough

> Reason acc. to an owner: That's what the linen service sends us.

* Hint: if you must stay here, bring your own bath towels, and sheets & blankets while you are at it.

3. There are NO PHONE JACKS in any room.

> Reason:

Everyone has cell phones now.

> When asked about connecting a computer to the internet using a dial-up phone connection they could only (shrug)

4. My wife was disappointed that the "effiency" with kitchen did NOT have a microwave, and/or a coffee-maker.

5. Among other things I was disappointed in was the TV. First, the TV was very old (1980s or earlier), and there was NO remote control in the room when we arrived. We had to request one from the office. The remote had only POWER ON/OFF, CHANNEL UP/DOWN, VOLUME ON/OFF, and MUTE. There was no NUMERICAL KEYPAD, so to go to a channel, you have to go UP/DOWN to go to it. While they do have cable, there was a listing of about 70 channels on a sign on the TV, unfortunately, the TV was not set-up to receive many of those channels.

Also, there was only 1 TV in a 2-room "apartment" that can sleep 6 (2 queen-size beds & 1 sofa-bed). The TV was in the "living room" that had the sofa-bed.

That's where the children slept, so we (the adults) could not watch TV from bed, because there was no TV in our room, a room with the 2 queen-size beds.

There is also NO PEEPHOLE to look at who might be knocking on the door without them seeing you.

6. The pool hours are very limited, which includes the times you can have a BBQ by the pool. The hours, as posted on the sign of rules, are 10am - 5pm. While our experience was that we were allowed in at around 9am, and closed at around 7:30pm, the posted hours could have been enforced at anytime. At another motel (a non-pet friendly one) that we stayed at 2 years ago, the pool had lights, and stayed open until around 11pm.

In conclusion, while I understand that it's a lot of work to run a mom & pop motel especially with very few people (mom, pop, 2 maids), and it's difficult to run a successful business, BEING FRIENDLY IS FREE, and it helps generate return business, and referrals.

For the past couple of years, my boyfriend, his two young sons and I have spent several of our summer days in Wildwood, NJ. Our cat travels well and behaves herself, so we like to bring her along on our vacations. Our options for lodgings in Wildwood, therefore, are limited to places that will accept pets. Satisfied, but not thrilled, with our previous lodgings (the Surf 16), we decided to see if we could do better. The Surf 16 is pretty expensive and far from luxe, so we figured at any rate we could not do worse.

How wrong we were.

Enter the New England Motel. It started well: the accommodations are cheap (about $150 a night for a mid-week room. Yes, this is cheap for Wildwood). The fee for having your pet there is a full $100 extra, however, non-refundable. Calling itself "pet friendly" is therefore a bit ridiculous. But hey, it's hard to find a place that accepts pets at all, so we were happy to pay it.

We figured the hotel was cheap because it is pretty far from the beach and boardwalk--about three-quarters of a mile. But we didn't mind that; the walk is enjoyable (though if you want to be right there where the action is, look closer in and further east). But the real reason for the cut-rates is that the owners appear to be insane.

1. On their webpage, they announce, "Mention this web page for FREE breakfast at local restaurant & boardwalk rides with reservation of 2 night's stay or more (restrictions apply)". So when we arrived, we asked about the free breakfast and rides. The female owner who checked us in seemed flustered by this. Apparently, one of the "restrictions" is that it doesn't apply in-season. (!) So, she offered to knock $10 off our bill to make up for it. Whatever; that was fine. We walked back to our room quite content.

2. Upon entry, we discovered that bizarrely, there was no phone jack in the rooms. Not just no phone; no *jack*. We had expected to be able to use the internet via dial-up, to check weather forecasts, read Wildwood restaurant reviews and look up alternate things to do in the area for when it rained, etc. When we asked where the phone was, to see if we needed to move to a room that *had* a phone jack, the owner explained that since the advent of cell phones, they had decided it made sense to have all the jacks completely removed. Something this idiosyncratic out to be explained before reservations are even accepted. In this day and age, it's like renting a hotel room that doesn't have towels or sheets...

Oh, wait:

3. The hotel room sleeps six. Yet when we arrived, there were exactly two bath towels in the room. We had to ask for more when we needed them, and were given only four at a time when we asked. (Four towels for four people is not reasonable where people are often showering twice a day because of trips to the beach). And the towels themselves are tiny, and cannot be less than ten years old. They are thin as tissue paper, and many are worn clean through, with holes in several spots.

3. The towels, however, must be be stored in their *fine* linens closets. Because their sheets are ridiculous. Not only do they feel like sandpaper, but they *don't even fit the beds*. The bed my boyfriend and I slept in had a topsheet for a single mattress on our double bed, so we were fighting each other for covers all night. But at least we *had* sheets. The boys wanted to sleep on the pull-out couch where the TV is, but when we pulled it out we discovered that it had no linens on it at *all*. We went downstairs to ask for sheets (plus an advance on our stingy allowance of towels), and were handed only a bottomsheet, no top sheet. Why? They explained they *didn't have any more*! That's right; in a hotel of no less than thirty rooms, they didn't have any topsheets to spare. No, scratch that--they don't even have enough topsheets to cover all the beds they have, let alone any to spare. (The blankets, by the way, are so disgusting and covered with dryer-pills they barely fold.)

4. Our vacation plan was to go to the beach all day, buy take-out food for dinner and eat it while playing cards and watching the summer Olympics all evening. We were really looking forward to this. The second night at the hotel (and the first night in front of the tube), the television set started cycling through channels all on its own. Fiddling with it did nothing, so we walked downstairs to the motel office (remember, you'll *always* have to walk down to the office with any questions or problems--and you'll have many--because they took out all the phone jacks). The female owner said she would send someone up right away; this turned out to be the male owner. He came up after about five minutes (pretty good), and then fiddled with the set for--no joke--about thirty minutes before deciding he needed to get another set. After about fifteen more minutes, he came back with another ancient set, and I helped him lift it onto the table and slide it onto its security rails (who, I thought to myself, does he think is going to steal that piece of crap?) I assumed he had gotten a set from one of the many, many other empty rooms, but after we finally got it secured in its brackets, he said, "I sure hope this one works; it's been sitting on my shelf forever, and I think it has the same problem as the other one." I had no idea what to say to a statement like that; deciding it might sound impolite to question the wisdom of getting a set with known problems from a dusty shelf instead of a working set from one of the tens of empty rooms, I said nothing at all. Then, he began fiddling with the replacement set as well, "testing" each channel, again while we were sitting there. This time he didn't leave for *over* thirty minutes. The whole time, he was regaling us with mind-numbingly dull lectures about what moisture does to TV sets, and about his planned fishing trip for the next day, and who knows what else. We were all nodding dumbly, making polite "mmm" and "that so?" sort of noises, hoping he would shut up and leave so we could get back to our card game. Needless to say, by the time he arrived, fiddled, replaced, fiddled some more, and finally left, we had missed the one swimming event final we had been most looking forward to all day, and it was close to bedtime.

5. The next day, I spotted the male owner outside and mentioned that we would have to leave very early the next morning to catch our plane, and asked if we should do any paperwork needed to check out that night (all hotels do this happily). He said he would figure it out and get back to us. A couple of hours passed and we never heard from him. We wanted to get this out of the way so that we could get back to cards and the Olympics, so my boyfriend finally schlepped down to the office to ask again about the check-out. When he asked if he could do the checkout process then, the owner said to him, "Do you know what an imperative job is?" This was a weird question. My boyfriend, not knowing what he was getting at, said, "Ummm... it's a priority?" The guy then launched into a half-hour long monologue about how the seat on his fishing boat had broken that morning, and showed my boyfriend all the tools he was using to fix it, and described the phone call he had made to Florida for parts... All the while, my boyfriend was patiently standing there and nodding, but finally said, "Does an 'imperative job' mean you want to come to our room to do this later?" So my boyfriend came back to our room, and we still hadn't made arrangements for the next morning.

6. Within the next hour, the "new" television began behaving exactly like the last set. We sent one of the boys to ask the owner to replace it, and he said he'd get to it when he was done doing whatever it was he was doing. Almost an hour later, he finally arrived with a can of WD-40 and a screwdriver, and again sat down and fiddled with the set. This time we didn't engage him in conversation, but went on with our card game, hoping it would speed him along. It was uncomfortable to have him setting there two feet away, however, and we were having a hard time enjoying a game (not to mention tension that we were missing the swimming events for *that* night, too). We kept waiting for him to finally give up and give us a working set from another room, but he just continued fiddling for about a half an hour. Finally, my boyfriend said, "Can you please just give us a new set and work on that one in your office?" The owner stopped working as though startled, then jumped up and began yelling at us, punctuating his outrage by calling my boyfriend "pal," and saying that there were no other sets in the office, otherwise he would have given us a working one last night, and again about the moisture, etc. etc. My boyfriend kept trying to interrupt his diatribe, as the boys and I sat there stunned, but *literally* he could get five words out before he'd start yelling again. It seems never to have occurred to him that he could give us a working set from the (empty) room next door, and in his rage he refused to even hear that suggestion. Finally, he announced he was just going to leave. I tried to pacify the situation, and began, "We are just frustrated because..." but he again interrupted and began yelling, this time at *me*, shouting that my boyfriend had put him on the defensive, and other bizarre things. At that point, I said that yes, perhaps he should just leave, but before he went, what about check out? He again began indignant hollering, saying that he would have to "inspect" the room before we left in the morning instead of doing it right now (presumably because he was in too much of a tizzy to do so). I asked what he needed to "inspect" (in all my years of hotel-staying, I've never once had my room "inspected" before I was allowed to leave) but he was too mad, I guess, to be capable of a coherent answer.

Needless to say, this upset the boys. We even worried that the crazy owner might come back in the middle of the night to harass us; we decided against putting the chain on the door to avoid problems because we thought if the boys saw us do that, they'd be too scared to sleep. Since we had already paid in full upfront, we decided to leave the next morning without waking up the owner to let him "inspect" our room; not only would doing so have guaranteed more unpleasantness, our experience suggested it would have put us at risk of not being able to leave in time to catch our plane. We'll see if the owners try anything with our credit card. I wouldn't put it past them (and if they do, I will certainly update this review).

All of the hotel/motels in Wildwood are Mom and Pops (with the exception of maybe one Days Inn). As such, pretty much all of them are somewhat run down and dingy, and the owners are uniformly a little impatient or a little eccentric. However, the New England Motel stands head and shoulders above the rest for its unrelenting corner-cutting, rudeness, and all-around foulness. Not to mention the apparent mental problems of at least one of the owners. After this experience, my boyfriend and I have vowed that next year, we will rent a condo. They go for about $1000 a week in Wildwood, and somehow I think they wouldn't be as awful. Or better yet, we might go to Florida. With roundtrip airfares at about $100 each, and *luxury* hotels (that take cats!) even cheaper than the dumps in Wildwood, it wouldn't cost much more. Plus, the water is warmer and if it rains there's far more to do there.

In short, I could not recommend the New England Motel unless you have a burning need to punish yourself. And even if so, just buy yourself a hairshirt and save yourself a few bucks.