COURTYARD MARRIOTT SANTA ANA

The rooms need to be updated. The bathroom ceiling was peeling and the light fixtures were falling out. The customer service team does a great job of making you feel welcome and are quick when it matters.

I was in the hotel for an event that was hosted there. Parking was obscenely expensive in the lot, which was half closed off as "reserved" - presumably for valet. One hour of parking is $10. Two hours is $14. The day rate was over $20. This is Irvine. Parking is easily available most places. I get that there is a limited amount for the hotel, but this is punative. Parking cost more than the event I attended.

Ugh. We traveled to Irvine for a softball tournament, and this is where the team chose to stay (from a list of "approved" lodging provided by the tournament organizer). Having stayed at a nearby Marriott not long ago, this hotel was truly a disappointment. The room was small, the shower door didn't close and had low water pressure, the ice machine in the hall didn't work, the elevator was excruciatingly slow and shared with the service staff, the refrigerator was broken -- it kept things cold, but the bars on the door that are supposed to keep drinks in place were missing, the carpet was scary, the bed was uncomfortable. WiFi was difficult on a PC.... this really is the worst place I have stayed in the last year. The only thing keeping me from giving it a one-star rating is the location: easy access to several highway entrances, tons of dining options nearby. Dining options are necessary because there is no free coffee (or breakfast), and you can't bring food or drinks into the lobby. The coffee maker in the room was comically small and hard to use (three people, one real coffee pod) and the predictable line at the Starbucks in the lobby was again comically long.

I generally hate leaving negative reviews but I feel compelled to warn others after my experience here. I am just glad I was travelling solo and not with my family or anyone with asthma or other respiratory vulnerabilities. In short, I believe this hotel has a mold problem. After sleeping here a few nights I started waking up with respiratory irritation and started poking around the room. The bathroom had a strong "damp" smell I'd been ignoring, but that didn't seem bad enough to cause what I'd been experiencing. I noticed something sticking out of the A/C unit so I took the cover off and found that at some point someone had shoved an entire package of dryer sheets inside, and they were damp and moldy. I was pretty horrified I'd been breathing air filtered through that for several nights. The hotel staff was very accommodating and kind and offered me a second room, but when I looked at the a/c unit in the second room I was dismayed to find that it was completely covered in mold growth. They offered me a third room and the front desk person even walked around with me to find one with a brand new a/c unit, but at that point I was so skeeved out I simply left and booked a room at the DoubleTree across the street. I'm not a mold expert, but multiple rooms with mold problems on different floors and sections of the hotel is not a good sign. I won't be staying here again unless I get news that the management has had the building evaluated for mold and a remediation performed if found necessary, and changes are made to how the air conditioning systems are maintained. It was clear that the hotel just runs the A/C units until they break and then replaces them with little to no cleaning or maintenance in the interval between, otherwise I as a customer wouldn't have been the one to discover multiple units with serious problems. Mold is a serious respiratory hazard. As I said at the beginning. I'm just glad my kid wasn't with me.