A Sad Place to Visit
We'd never stayed in a Clarion facility before and thought we'd get acquainted by staying at this venue on a quick turn-around overnight trip to Seattle. I have no idea whether or not other Clarion Hotels are like this one, but given our experience I am probably not apt to find out. The Clarion at Sea-Tac feels like someone who dressed up ten or fifteen years ago to go out on a date that never quite happened. Everything is there - spacious rooms, in-hotel cafe and lounge, banquet facilities, big lobby --- but overall, the place feels empty and sad. Everything is shabby and run down - hallway carpets, furniture in the rooms, elevator, stairwells. And the room was freezing - until we put the window airconditioning/heater on -- and then it (loudly) poured too much heat into the room and seemed to be permanent stuck on high no matter how we tried to reset it. There seems to be no other source of heat - in the rooms or in the hallways - there were no thermostats in the room so I can only assume. We looked around for extra blankets - no such luck. I tried calling the desk, but it was late and no one answered. So we "layered up" in sweat shirts and jackets to go to bed. Once we settled in, we discovered that something in the room (smoke alarm??) beeped every fifteen minutes throughout the night. It may have been beeping earlier in the evening but we were watching TV turned up because there was no closed captioning even though the clicker indicated there was. It wasn't entirely awful - the bathroom was sparkling clean, the desk clerks we did meet and the cleaning staff we encountered in the hallways were very friendly and we enjoyed a good breakfast in the restaurant though the very attentive hostess seemed to be hostessing, waiting, helping to cook and delivering room service. No one else was in evidence. We left feeling sorry for the place. With so MANY places to stay in Sea-Tac, I feel its days are numbered. It is much less expensive than the Hilton across the street - but there are many other options nearby which are as inexpensive or even more so and far "happier" places to spend a night.