I rarely stay at Best Western hotels. Frankly they are out of my normal price range. But my daughter and 2 grandchildren and I stayed at the Best Western Plus in Woodstock this past weekend as a weekend getaway. We chose the Best Western mostly due to the pool (so the children could play) and proximity to the 401. We arrived Friday night and settled in with all our belongings knowing that we would be there for 2 nights. The first night was fine with the exception of the kids running the halls and making all kinds of noise. Apparently, some hockey tournament people were staying there. I don't know why the parents are not made to control their children. Or why the children are not taught to respect their surroundings and other hotel guests. Or why the hotel was not concerned about the disruptive behaviour. However, as you read to the bottom of this, I guess it all goes back to the power of the bottom line. The second day, after an early afternoon swim, we noticed the heat in the room would not turn on. I asked the cleaning lady (who was in the room across the hall) if we were doing something wrong and she was very nice and said no. She hit a reset button on the heating unit and the heat came on for a couple of hours. Then it went off again. I called the front desk and the person there told me to "wait half an hour to see if it would come on". It did not. I called again and she moved us to another room, which would not have been my preference. There should have been someone she could call to have the unit fixed. It took us over an hour to move a 4 month old and a 4 year old and all of our belongings to another room. When I asked the front desk staff if she could give us any kind of discount for our inconvenience, she said "no". And said we were lucky there was an empty room because if the hotel had been full she wouldn't have been able to move us. So, was she saying we would have had to stay in the room with no heat (during the coldest weekend of the winter so far), or that she would send us away (during the first real snow storm of the season)? The next morning when I left our room, the room we had vacated was open. I went in to talk with the cleaning lady to explain about the heat and she wasn't there. The thermostat read 12 degrees C. There's no way we could have kept the kids in that room that night. I called the manager of the hotel Monday morning and complained about the poor attitude and poor customer service of this particular staff. Ms. Smith's response to me was that it was not financially feasible to their bottom line to have maintenance staff on hand/on call on the weekend. So what I hear is that her bottom line is more important than her customers. Since I rarely spend my money on a higher end hotel, I guess I had higher expectations of what customer service should look like. I've had better experiences at far lower cost in other hotels. If they had been a bit nicer; maybe given us a free night's stay at any Best Western, or reduced our price of this stay, maybe it would have made moving to another room more palatable. It was not our fault the heat in the room was not working. And it was certainly an expectation when booking the room that we would be 100% satisfied with our stay. We will not be returning to the Woodstock Best Western, and we will not be recommending this establishment to any of our friends. less