Hampton Inn East Lansing

The Hampton had everything we needed and was exceptionally clean. I was impressed. The kids swam and there were plenty of chairs to sit and watch. Breakfast had solid options, and the 24hr coffee was nice too

I always stay here when I visit East Lansing. My kids live within a five mile radius: dining and shopping are quite close: the staff is superb and the rooms are comfortable. What more could I ask?

We have stayed at this Hampton Inn several times in years past when visiting our children while they were at Michigan State. This time, we were delighted to find that the entire hotel, from lobby to breakfast area to all of the rooms, had been remodeled. The rooms were immaculate, the decor updated and pleasing and the beds were extremely comfortable. We thoroughly enjoyed our stay and have already recommended this Hampton Inn to friends.

The room's view was of a wall, the pool was mediocre and the parking was sub-par. They also had this ill thought out green system that won't let you turn on the bathroom lights without your door key card. It's not that I'm against saving energy, but it's annoying and I'm not too sure how much electricity they're saving when every other light was on in the room when I entered and the air conditioner had the room at a balmy 55 degrees. But this pales in comparision to the situation that has made me vow to never stay at a Hampton Inn ever again. My job requires a bit of traveling from time to time and I some time in hotel rooms. That being the case I usually travel with my own dvd player due to the fact that most hotels don't furnish dvd players and I can't stand watching movies on my laptop. Anyway to the point of this side story. Typically I just hook up my dvd player to the tv and watch my netflix, but not here. The source on the television (despite the it being a flatscreen TV supporting 3 HDMI, 3 Video, VGA, and even a Serial port) was not selectable. I figured it may be a brand I'm not familiar with or a hardware malfunction, so I went to the desk to ask about the issue. The woman at the desk gave me a look of shock and disbelief that I wanted to hook a dvd player up to the tv and promptly told me, "You can't do that." I haven't been told I can't hook up AV equipment since I was eleven and staying with my elderly aunt who believed that televisons require college educated technitions to operate. The fact that she gave me that look that said, "How dare you!" just compounded my disappointment in the situation. This is the hotel that has the gall to treat there guests as children. The guests are not to be trusted with the televisions or even something as simple as turning off the bathroom light. Call me picky but settling for basic cable with HBO and pay per view just isn't acceptable at a place with rates like this. I'd expect this out of some small little mom n' pop operation, but even they normally don't go through all the trouble of locking down the television functions. All this stuff was set up intentionally to keep the guest from hooking anything up. The cables were even locked in place with fittings that required special tools to unscrew them. And if it sounds like I'm ranting for a long time about this place it's because I had a lot of time to think about writing this review while I sat in my cold dark hotel room watching old reruns of sitcoms.