The Inns at Equinox

Am I the only one that notices that the only positive review is from over a year ago??? I honestly can’t think of one reason to go back! Old, dirty rooms, portable heater in a room, closed restaurants….i can go on and on. Anyone remember the wonderful GM that walked the property with his beautiful dog and actually TALKED to guests?? Good luck finding his replacement, it took an act of congress to get his name from the miserable desk manager that seems to hate people. The incredible chef that would come out into the restaurant and describe his food and cared what people thought? He’s gone too. Eat in a restaurant??? Nope, they serve food in the small bar now. Valet parking?? The front desk literally laughed when I asked if it was available. Wine receptions for guests, guided hikes, anything resembling caring about guests…long gone. I’d rather spend a weekend at Alcatraz than come back to this alleged “resort”! It’s sad when an iconic “resorr” can’t come close to the Hampton inn down the street.

Everything was dirty or worn out. We didn’t get the room we reserved. The heat was so loud it kept waking us up the toilet was to small for adults. The shower drain was clogged. The bedding was small and cheap. Breakfast downstairs made us violently ill

If it wasn’t for Tamika at the reservation desk, this review would have been less than a one if possible. She saved what would have been a nightmare. The temperature outdoors was in the 30s when we arrived. When we got to the room we were assigned it was freezing cold in the room. We tried to adjust the thermostat. Nothing. We went back downstairs and were told the engineers would look at it. Then I heard him say something about a fuse blown possibility and portable heaters. My antennae went up. We hung around the desk, begged Tamika to help us, and the end result is that the fuse was blown and they would bring up heaters. Unacceptable. She gave the engineers a list of available rooms and their task was to find one in which the heat worked. Success. The new room was warm and there was no musty smell like the other room had. In the meantime the mgr I had spoken with before this positive outcome told me they only set the heat at 65 degrees no matter how cold outdoors. Shouldn’t that be shared on their website? The building is old and that is part of its charm but it is very cold in the halls and restaurants. Lots of upkeep to do and needed and they probably can’t afford it. Cleanliness is livable. It’s a huge premises. The restaurant staff was A+. Pleasant. Work so hard. Thank you. Food ok. We didn’t get sick. The Thanksgiving buffet was excellent. Turkey great. We didn’t get to the pool and spa amenities. And classes. Those are benefits we are sorry we missed. I doubt we will be back but the area, the mts, are gorgeous so it’s worth coming to this area.

Believe every bad review you read about this hotel and then think worse. With the exception of the staff they are exceptional given what they have to work with. The property inside and out is dirty, rundown, dated and completely understaffed. We stayed in the Orvis Inn, a separate building that we now call the kennel. Dogs barked constantly on and off for 2 days from 3 different rooms. The hotel manager was unable to rectify this issue in a timely manor. The stairwell had smelly trash in bags sitting there the entire stay. The key cards did not work on the back door as the pad was broken. There are zero appropriate amenities for the ridiculous rates they charge. No bathrobes, no coffee/tea service in the Inn like the main hotel (keep in mind the Orvis is a special upgrade!). The furniture in the rooms looks like it was left on the street by students moving out of their apartments at the end of year. The bathrooms are okay all though the soaking tub was hard to use as the drain plug was broken. Most the blinds are old and don’t properly close and the fireplace is a cheap fake, so do be fooled by the photos on line. The Televisions, while large are not smart. Connectivity to Netflix etc would help with limited the channel selection. Let’s now talk about the resort fee ! What a joke !! The spa is dirty and run down. The hot tub not working, murky water and full of leaves. The pool water is green and the pool deck is filthy dirty. The curtains on the windows in the pool area have been removed, it looks like by dull garden shears as the remaining fabric is still attached. The pool towels are old and faded. The changing rooms are dirty, half the lockers don’t lock, several are missing doors. The sauna does not work. The fire place in the spa is broken. The furnishing look like the have also been put roadside with signs marked free and no takers. The doors are all scratched and banged up and the facility desperately needs paint. There is no relaxation room. The gym is undersized and 2 out of three treadmills were broken. On a positive note the SPA STAFF are lovely and the treatments were excellent. Don’t bother trying to eat here. The restaurants have limited hours and look dirty which really makes one question what the kitchens look like. It’s a hotel that has great potential as the setting is lovely. As previously mentioned they are understaffed. But the staff they do have are great. They try their best and are polite and as helpful as they can be given what they have to work with. I feel for them as they spend a great amount of time apologizing to disappointed guests. Until they dump some significant money into fixing this hotel up I would recommend a hard pass. As you will see by the hotels response they will politely thank you for your feedback. Nothing will change and they will keep collecting money from the next guest who may or may not take the time to write a review. At age 62 this is the first hotel review I have ever bothered to write which should indicate how disappointing this property is.

Whatever you do, don’t get married at the Equinox Resort in Manchester. Let our experience help you avoid a nightmare. The setting is undeniably stunning, and that’s how they lay the trap. As soon as you’ve signed the contract the bait and switch begins. There are 2 fundamental issues, the event staff is woefully underresourced, the the hotel desperately needs a major renovation. To be fair to the one employee who was consistently incredible, Jackie, who managed the room blocks, you are great. But the organization of the room block doesn’t make up for an underperforming events team. There is also a fundamental assumption to note. For our family, the $100k - $150k+ in revenue the wedding brought to the hotel is a lot of money. A lot, a lot, a lot of money! It’s the largest amount of money we’ll spend at one time. That’s a college education. For the Equinox Resort, that makes you 1 of 3 weddings they’ll do that weekend with 3 more the next weekend, and they know you’re not coming back again. Any corporate event or corporate client is going to be more important than you are, and that's not an inference, the Head of Sales said that specifically. Think about it with 3 weddings most weekends, they don’t have 3 bridal suites, they just say any room in the Orvis House is a “bridal suite.” After seeing how dirty our room was when we arrived, the front desk tried to move us to the largest ‘suite’ in the Orvis House to apologize. The head of sales stepped in, “It’s reserved for the MInister's conference, they come back every year.” The room was so bad we had to find another place for the Bride to get ready off-property the morning of the wedding so it didn’t ruin the getting-ready photos. The event staff. They’ll tell you everything is set up, and by the time you get to the event, it’s too late to have them execute all the details they’ve missed. “There’s just not enough time,” you’ll hear. Your choice is to spend the most important hours of your life fighting with them over all the things they failed to execute or spend the time with the people who love you and came to celebrate your big day. They prey on this fact, it’s predatory. Get to the finish line and then say we can’t possibly do all the things we told you we would. If the details are important to you, go somewhere else. Ultimately, if you can bring in your own event staff to overcome their deficiencies, and you tell your guests to stay somewhere else, it’s possible to have a great event. You could work around them, but if you have to spend that much energy, just go somewhere else. Our original wedding coordinator quit, and after a month of unanswered emails, we reached out to the staff. As soon as we’d signed the contract it was harder to get her to reply, which made it more difficult to notice when she’d stopped replying at all. When we called, the hotel’s response was, “oh she quit weeks ago.” Was someone going to tell us? Then we were ping-ponged back and forth between other coordinators throughout the rest of the time. No one had ownership, and that continued so much so that there wasn’t even a wedding coordinator at our ceremony. I repeat, the Equinox did not even have a wedding coordinator at our wedding ceremony. When the Equinox shuttle forgot to pick up the bride, there was no one there to assist. 15 minutes after the wedding was scheduled to start and all the guests were all seated, the bride decided to walk herself up from the Meadow House fearing the shuttle would never arrive. AND THERE WAS NO COORDINATOR TO ASSIST. You can stop reading now if you’d like, but there is so much more. The night before at the rehearsal dinner, they set up one very nice table for 64 people. Unfortunately, the executed, agreed event form was for 68. Their team's disorganization is immediately obvious when you're at the venue, and so I took the time in the middle of the rehearsal to count the seats. I personally told the event planner Ella, there are only 64 chairs. She looks at her paperwork showing 68 guests, and she says, no there are 68. I told her she should count them and then went to be with our guests at our wedding. Ella did nothing, and then as everyone was seated there were 6 people without chairs, standing in the middle of the venue. (6 because 2 seats were still empty at the 64-person table, but no one wanted to take the last 2 when there obviously wasn't room for the entire party). Now with people eating and speeches about to begin Ella has the team rush to put out another table off to the side to seat the 6 people standing. Then, and this is the real beauty of it, she doubles down. She tries to say that we invited too many people, that we had 74, instead of 68, which is why she was forced to make another table. No apologies, and in fact, they are so understaffed they have to blame someone. When they screw up, expect them to try to blame you. The hotel itself is in desperate need of a total renovation, desperate. They've been putting lipstick on a pig with new paint, but even individual rooms have multiple previous partial updates that are incongruous. Our room I called the divorced dad room, because it looked like the apartment a dad moves into after a divorce. I'm describing a "bridal suite". It had a 1980s glass bar display that hadn't been cleaned in weeks, a completely disorganized 1990s kitchenette (again Bridal Suite), and cheap Ikea furniture everywhere else. I've stayed in nicer Hampton Inns. When it says 3-star hotel on Google, you should believe them, and it's absolutely tragic given the history of the "resort." No indoor pool or falconry can make up for the fact that even the door looked like someone had recently broken in. If the ownership group can't afford to keep the hotel up to the National Historic standards, they should sell this and allow someone else to restore its beautiful bones. If nothing else, a few pieces of advice: 1) Have the actual hotel room you'll be staying in for the wedding in the contract. Make them show you the room. They're going to try to tell you the "bridal suite" is in use when you're touring the property. Demand to see the room and make them put it in the contract. 2) Have the tasting date in the contract. They'll tell you they can't schedule it in advance because the next year's menu isn't finalized (lol), and then when you try to schedule 6 months ahead of the venue, Wednesdays are going to be the only days they're available. They're going to make it as inconvenient as humanly possible, especially if you're traveling from out of town, again, they're criminally understaffed, and they need to focus on getting more people to sign contracts. 3) Hire an independent wedding planner, but not a local one. We tried to do this to try to have an independent advocate who could help manage their chaos. However, the Equinox staff just used our planner as their wedding day coordinator, so they could use their event staff at other weddings and events on the property. We didn't have an Equinox coordinator at our ceremony because they'd deputized our planner to do everything. If you're going to do a ceremony here, bring someone in to manage their event staff. You'll need it.