I stayed the night of September 25 in the Clarion Hotel at 429 Park Ave. South in New York. I want to relate my experience at the hotel. After I checked in at 5:45pm on September 25th, I went immediately to my room (I believe it was room 608) and, without stopping, made a beeline to the phone to call the operator to ask for a non-smoking room, having been hit by an overpowering odor of smoke as soon as entered the room. I'm not particularly sensitive to smoke, but the odor that permeated the room was stale, fetid, and highly unpleasant nearly to the point of nauseating. The receptionist reported that, although many people had not yet checked in, there were no no-smoking rooms left. As I was to be meeting business colleagues from Spain in this hotel early the next morning, I could not easily move to another hotel. Moreover, as soon as I got off the phone with the hotel receptionists, friends with whom I was going out to dinner called to let me know that they had arrived, so I felt I had no choice but to leave for dinner with my friends at that point and then spend the night in the hotel's rank and rancid room. The smell was sufficiently foul that I woke repeatedly during the night from it (and I have no difficulty sleeping through the night normally). When I arrived home on September 26, my family remarked quite negatively on the smoke smell from my hair and even from a shirt that I pulled from my suitcase that had rested on a chair in the hotel room during the night. Only the suit I was wearing did not smell as it had spent the night hanging in a dry cleaner's bag in the hotel room closet. The next morning, in order to meet my Spanish colleagues downstairs in the lobby at 7am, I left the hotel room just at 7:00, entered the elevator, pushed the lobby button, saw the elevator door close, and then waited. Unfortunately, nothing happened. The door remained closed, the elevator did not move, and it was clear that the elevator was stuck. The door would not reopen when I pressed 6, as I had entered on the 6th floor, nor would it move to any other floor. I pushed the alarm button a number of times in the first few minutes assuming that the receptionist – or someone working at the hotel – would respond by speaking through the speaker in the elevator. As no one did, I continued to press the alarm button for nearly fifteen minutes. Because it was obvious that no one was responding, on my cellphone I finally called an American business colleague who was also staying at the hotel and meeting up with our Spanish colleagues in the lobby, to ask him to let the hotel personnel know that I was stuck in the elevator. Only at that point, a couple of minutes after my phone call to my colleague did the hotel receptionist initiate any discussion with me and contact the fire department or the company which services the elevator. When I was finally released from the elevator after being there for 45 minutes (which wasn't so terrible as I sat on the elevator floor and worked on my computer), I went to the receptionist and asked as to why no one responded when the alarm bell rang; this seemed to me to be a dangerous situation as someone with no cell phone could have been there much longer. The receptionist's response was “oh, no, I responded right away.” When I pointed out that I did not hear her voice until 7:20am, she was insistent that she had talked with me in the elevator as soon as she had arrived at 7am, which of course she had not. When I then pointed out that my colleague had to inform her of the elevator being stuck at some time after 7:15am as she was unaware that it was stuck, against all logic, she kept insisting that she had responded immediately at 7am. I could see no sense in trying to discuss this with someone who was lying, most likely to cover her tracks for failing to respond and most probably for being late to work (not arriving on time at 7am). What does this experience suggest? That this hotel, and by extension, as Clarion operates a network of hotels whose standards are presumably expected to be consistent throughout the network, all Clarion hotels are not capable of delivering even modestly acceptable service. Given that four no-smoking rooms were requested (for myself, my American colleague, and my two Spanish colleagues) and Clarion could deliver only three, having accepted the reservations for four, I have to assume that their reservation system is flawed. Moreover, even someone who smoked would be likely to find room 608 to be unacceptable due to its smell. The status of that room has to cast doubt on the general cleanliness and the cleaning standards or processes of the hotel. The elevator breaking is probably the least problematic, as elevators do occasionally break, unless this has happened before with the same elevator, which then calls into doubt the maintenance in your hotels. My colleague also picked up a cue that possibly the hotel was supposed to have a mechanism to open locked elevator doors as the elevator company service person who came to release me seemed to suggest that this was the case. If this is correct, then Clarion's safety systems are not working and their hotel personnel are not well (or at all) trained. Certainly, the receptionist's response to me after the elevator incident suggests either poor hiring practices (they hired someone who wasn't smart enough to realize that she had been caught in her own lie – why would my colleague have had to inform her at 7:20am that I was stuck in the elevator if she had already been talking to me in the elevator at 7am?) and also poor training. At this point, I am not certain what if anything this hotel did well other than buying property at a good location on Park Ave. Beyond that, their performance was abysmal.