I've traveled a lot, and generally don't expect extended-stay-type hotels to have the frilly offerings of more upscale hotels. (In other words, I know the difference between the different hospitality types out there) BUT, what I DO expect is an efficient staff and a clean and functioning room - especially for a place that specializes in extended stay and corporate guests.

This particular hotel did not impress us in the least. Yes, it's a newer facility; yes, it has kitchenettes; and yes, it's quite close to the Dulles corridor and Herndon and Reston and Sterling and Dulles Airport. But, we had problems.

The check-in process was slow and unorganized.

We were assigned an already-occupied room. When we went to get a new room, the clerk said the room he assigned us was shown on his puter as unoccupied. (Not very reassuring right there!) He had to walk the hallway with a pass-key and check a couple of rooms before he found one that was unoccupied. NOTE: He NEVER knocked on the door FIRST before utilizing the pass-key to enter the room. Having been educated in the hospitality field, we were taught ALWAYS to knock a couple of times before trying to enter a room! Needless to say, we kept the latch on when we were in the room, but we worried about our belongings while we were out during the day.

The room smelled. Yes, it was a kitchenette room, but other kitchenette places I've stayed at manage to obliterate these lingering odors. Besides, it didn't really smell like food. It smelled more like mildew.

One light didn't have a bulb in it at all and a second light didn't work.

The secondary entrance stairwell smelled strongly like old pancake syrup. Very odd.

The next morning (which was a weekend day), apparently a neighbor was cooking hamburger because it vented directly into our bathroom!

The bed was so uncomfortable, we couldn't wait to be on the plane to get back home.

We stayed here 3 days and after using my key-card once, the magnetic encoding erased and I had to get it re-encoded every other time I tried to use it. The explanation at the desk was that this was normal and it was okay to keep coming to the desk to get it done. Funny, but I've not had to have my key-card re-encoded nearly as much in any other place as I did here.

Front desk closes at a certain time and won't open until 7am the next morning. I was unable to get a receipt for my stay because we left before the desk opened.

STAFF: Check-in guy - nice, very apologetic, but not organized. Night clerk #1: Very nice, helped w/re-coding my key-card, but had that puzzling explanation about the magnetism of the key-cards. Night clerk #2: No guest-relation skills at all. And, she didn't tell the morning crew to send me a copy of my bill because I've not received one yet. I'm going to have to contact the site myself.

We were very happy to have gotten into this hotel at a discounted rate through Hotwire, but would we stay there again? The answer is no. Would we recommend it to others? Generally, no - but different people value different things about a nights stay, so it might suffice for some.