Our Sleepless Stay at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas

To preface this article I have to say that we once loved Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas. We were married in their chapel and loved our stay there for our honeymoon a few years back; so when looking for a hotel to stay at for a recent trip to a convention, it was a no-brainer -- or so we thought.

To start off, we reserved three rooms, two of which were adjoined, for ourselves and our 4 kids. The third room was next door to us and held my in-laws, who flew in from Wisconsin and watched our kiddos while we spend 3 full days in sessions.

We arrived to check-in at around 5:30PM and found that the check-in line wrapped around the entire lobby, almost to the elevator area -- not exactly a sight someone towing 6 bags and 4 kids wants to see. I got in line and waited while it crept ever-so-slowly towards the front desk. After over an hour in line and a snide tweet to @phvegas about the long wait, I was finally able to check-in. The man at the check-in was nice enough to let the rest of my family come to the front and show ID to get a key, rather than making them wait it out in line as well. I was also happy to find that the hotel had actually made a note on our account that we needed rooms together and reserved them for us upon check in.

However, that is where my happiness with the Planet Hollywood ended...

When we arrived in our rooms, they were all relatively nice and clean with the exception of the black mold in the bathroom toilet area and the bathtub in our room, which had pubic hair in it (YUCK)! I held back my gag reflex and swore off bathing in the tub; opting instead for a shower. The only issue with the shower was the fact that the water took FOREVER to get hot.

Aside from the bathroom, the rooms were nice and the bed was comfy. We called the front desk and had a folding crib (ie: Graco Pack and Play) delivered to the room for our little one to sleep in. The man who delivered it was very nice and arrived quickly. After setting up the baby's crib, we watched TV for a bit and drifted off to slumber land around 11PM that night. Sometime around 1AM I was awakened by the sound of a fire alarm with sirens going off in the distance or possibly coming from the air conditioning vent, but didn't think much of it. I fell back asleep and not too long after, I heard it again and this time our baby was awakened. I got up to feed her and sat there listening while the alarm would go on and off for the following hour. I was exhausted and fell asleep, hoping that it would be resolved before the next night.

The Mr. and I woke up at 6AM, got ready, and left for the convention we were there to attend. At 6AM the alarm was still going off in the distance and I would hear it every now and then. We went down the elevator and walked through the Miracle Mile shops and the fire alarm began going off while we walked through and I thought to myself that the sound we heard must have been coming from there.

The next night we came back exhausted from a day full of conference sessions and the first thing I heard was those damn sirens again. I honestly thought to myself that someone had to have complained by now and hoped they were going to fix it. I mean, really, how could they not hear it?! I tweeted to @phvegas again that the sirens had been going off for days, hoping that they had someone manning their twitter account, but got no reply.  So we watched TV for a bit and fell asleep, only to be awakened several more times by the sound of the alarm (or whatever it was). I tried desperately to go back to sleep and finally turned on the TV to drown out the sound.

I was really in a jam because our baby was sleeping, so I couldn't just call up room service because it would wake her up, which is why I used to Twitter to try and get in touch. In addition, our days were so crammed full of sessions and activities that I had no time to go wait in line at the customer service area to complain.

Repeat the above paragraph for the following nights of our stay... By our final day at Planet Hollywood we were beyond exhausted.

We hadn't slept well for several nights and it finally got the best of me. While packing up to leave, I recorded a snippet of the sound we were hearing the entire time. It's very short because it was hard to capture sound with a video camera on my phone without kids talking over it.

The sound you hear in the very first second or two of the video is the alarm which would go on and on for about a minute and then there would be some sort of talking (that was hard to hear), followed again by the siren sound over and over. If I would have been able to sit there for a little while longer and record video, I would have been able to give you the full effect, but it was check out time and everyone was waiting on me (trying to keep quiet while I recorded the sound).

As I was checking out, I decided I would go tell the manager what had happened. I was wondering if there was an explanation or anything that they could offer (a discount wouldn't have hurt matters either). After waiting 15 minutes for the manager to come to the desk to talk to me, I told him that we loved Planet Hollywood and got married there, but that this stay was just horrible. I explained about the sound we heard and that it kept us awake for 3 days out of the 5 we stayed there, to which he responded "no one else complained, and there is nothing I can do about it because you didn't tell us about it". Really?! I tried explaining that I couldn't A. wake up our baby who was sleeping in our room to make a phone call in the middle of the night to the front desk and B. was VERY busy and could not spare the time waiting to talk to a manager prior to checkout. He began to get quite irritated and the more I explained, the more rude he became. For everything I said, he had some lame explanation as to why they weren't responsible for the sounds we all heard that kept us up all night (and to paraphrase: they aren't responsible our quality of sleep). I got fed up after 5 minutes of arguing with the manager and finally told him that my family would never stay at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas again and that I would be sure and tell everyone I knew that Planet Hollywood doesn't care about the quality of sleep you get at their hotel. To which he responded "I'm not responsible for what you put on the internet". Heh. Ya think?