So, my mother has had a lifelong dream of visiting the Niagara Falls and spending one night in a room with a great view of the Canadian falls. This year, things finally came together so that I could send her and my sister to Canada, and make her Niagara Falls dream come true.

I have to admit was shocked by how difficult (= impossible) this turned out to be. Large parts of the hotel (and travel) industry outside Europe seems trapped in the 90s. It was nigh impossible to get a good idea, from official hotel websites, of how the rooms actually look; photos tend to be tiny, blurry, and poorly composed. Traveller photos are marginally better, and they typically do not give a good overview of premium rooms (where they do, it's difficult to find photos of any specific room category). Trying to get an idea of what the views are actually like is literally impossible, at least if you look at official websites: the room listings typically feature [comically poorly] photoshopped images with blatantly fake views pasted into the windows. Traveller photos and videos ameliorate this problem somewhat, but just barely.

So anyway, after a lot of frustrating research, I determined that the high floor 2-room presidential suites at the Embassy Suites (Hilton) at Niagara Falls were likely to offer fantastic views of the horseshoe falls, and booked such a room. The website specified a particular floor number that falls into the high floor category, and the confirmation mail did the same. I spoke with their CS reps twice prior to their stay, about other issues, and they confirmed that the floor in question fell into the high floor category. Despite this, my mother was assigned a room on the 14th floor upon arrival, which is not in the same category, and from which the views are markedly different (despite this the hotel apparently charges exactly the same rate). My mum is elderly and she was exhausted from travelling, so she hesitantly accepted staff's confident assurance that she must have been mistaken about being promised a room on a particular floor because it was impossible that they would specify a floor number or category. The manager's reaction was similar (even after reviewing the confirmation mail ).

This experience (as well as other aspects of the stay) has felt decidedly anachronistic. Over the past few years, I've grown accustomed to using clear, informative hotel websites, and dealing with somewhat honest hotels, so I find it a little difficult to accept a situation where it is impossible for me to make an informed choice about a hotel stay. It's obviously difficult for a hotel to guarantee a specific room, but they should be expected to be able to guarantee a room in a particular category or better. I can understand how situations like this may come about; the realities of the hospitality industry are famously ugly, and encourage the exploitation of judicious ambiguity, convenient "mistakes", etc. But I hadn't realized how fortunate I'd been until now.

My mother was absolutely blown away by the Falls and the rest of her trip will, I think, be really fun. But the treatment by hotel staff spoiled the realization of her lifelong dream somewhat, and the entire experience has kinda disheartened my inner consumerist. The misleading info remains on the hotel's website, so I have, for the first time in my life, filed a complaint with the BBB (clearly I'm ready to become a grandfather). From now on, I think I'll just stick to smaller, more modern hotels. But,