To all you travelers planning to stay in San Diego, please do not stay in this motel! While attending the ESRI User Conference (2006) I had booked a room at the Handlery Hotel on Hotel Circle, north of the downtown. We had booked the room for two nights, and it was everything we expected for the $120 we paid per night; clean, central air, friendly staff.

The day we were supposed to leave, my boss informed me and my co-worker that we could stay and extra day if we needed to, so we did. However, when we tried to book the same hotel, we were informed that rooms were no longer available. We looked on hotels.com for a nice hotel, but it seemed that all the good hotels were already taken by those attending the conference, Seaworld, and everything else. We then came across this dump, and it looked nice in the pictures. We tried reading the reviews for this motel, and although it had a 1 out of 5 star rating, it had no reviews and so we decided to book it for the extra night. Big mistake! We get there, and the hotel is in a Barrio. For those who don't know what that is, it's basically a gang and drug infested Latino neighborhood.

The hotel parking was tight, and although we managed to get parking, it didn't look like there would be any room left for those who got there later, which meant you would have to park outside the motel where someone could steal your car. We walked into the motel lobby and it smelled like urine. Two females in front of us where trying to get their reservations cancelled, stressing that they had been misled by the pictures, and that the hotels smelled like cigarettes. Most disturbing to them was the fact that there room faced an alley full of litter. They were told that if they cancelled their stay that they would have to pay for one night, but they didn't mind and told the clerk that they didn't care as long as they could "leave this dump".

When it was our turn we told them we also wished to cancel our reservations, and they told us the same thing; "You can, but you'll be charged for one night," which was a problem because we were only staying for one night. To top off my nightmare, another person booked the same type of room for $79, when we had booked it for $119; literally a dollar short of what we had paid to stay at the nice Handlery Hotel. I got into an argument with the clerk and she told me "If you want a nice room, why don't you go stay at the Holiday Inn”, to which I replied "I will if you give me a refund. She told me she couldn't because we had booked through hotels.com. So we contacted hotels.com, told them our horror story, complained about everything you've read, including the urine-smelling lobby. They called the motel to ask why it smelled like urine, and the clerk told the hotels.com operator that our issue had been the $40 extra dollars we had paid on hotels.com compared to others who walked in and paid $79. This was far from the truth, since we would have gladly paid $40 extra dollars as long as it was a respectable hotel.

As a matter of fact, my company was paying for everything, so it the price didn’t even faze me. After about an hour and a half of being on the phone we were booked at another hellhole, the Ramada, even further south. The exterior was much nicer but my room reeked of cigarettes so bad that I couldn't sleep even with the windows open and the A/C full blast. In the morning I woke up and put on my clean, Downey-scented clothes. About 15 minutes later when I checked out in the lobby, my co-worker told me I smelled horrible, even though I had just taken a shower and had just put on clean clothes.

Moral of the story: Book north of Petco Park and the Gas Lamp Quarter!