Mt. Olympus

I know I told you this post was going to be up last Thursday, but I was giving the hotel the benefit of the doubt to respond to me after the email I originally sent bounced back. (So awesome that the email address provided on their website goes nowhere).

I still plan to pursue contacting the hotel, but I really want everyone to know what is up with Mt. Olympus in Wisconsin Dells so no one else has the experience we had.

My boyfriend and I were looking for a nice weekend getaway to somewhere fun that wasn’t going to cost a fortune. We looked through Groupons for Chicago and Lake Geneva to start and after reading some hotel reviews or finding hidden costs, we decided that wasn’t the route to go.

We then decided to go to Wisconsin Dells and just stay at a hotel and enjoy ourselves doing whatever. We weren’t finding too much in the low cost range that was open before May 1, and Kalahari and other waterparks seemed out of our price range. Then we stumbled across what seemed to be an unbelievable deal for Mt. Olympus. Neither my boyfriend nor I had ever been there.

I read the fine print and everything seemed ok, it just sounded like the buildings weren’t connected so there would be some outside walking to get to the waterpark or theme park. If we booked by midnight that night we would save over $100. (Right there I should have known something fishy was up). But alas, we booked it and got very excited that we would be able to relax in a hot tub, maybe go down a slide, eat dinner at the resort, get a drink or two and then walk back to our room. (The pictures of the rooms were really cool too, another selling point that was misleading!)

So we left at 10:30 and headed up to the Dells. We couldn’t check in until 4, but we headed up anyways to check out the town. I introduced my boyfriend to Nig’s and of course we had a Swig.

We then walked across the street to Monk’s and got really yummy sandwiches at Monk’s, then walked the strip and got blizzards at Dairy Queen. We checked out the riverwalk and stopped to take a few pictures. We walked a little bit more and then decided that it was a little after 3 and we would try to check in.

Getting into Mt. Olympus is a little bit of a zoo. There are painted lines all over the parking lot but it still really looks like a maze and disaster. Check in went smoothly until the guy pulled out the map and circled that we were in building 25. I didn’t realize how far away it was but we got in the truck and started driving.

If you are familiar with the Dells at all, you know that on the hotel drag, there were a lot of small, older hotels. For instance, Play Day, Shamrock, Carousel are a few of the ones that come to mind. They don’t have water parks but most had a pool and a decent room if you needed to spend a night at the Dells.

Well…….a lot of the little hotels have been bought out by Mt. Olympus. They are all being painted white and blue, including the one that goes over the road near Noah’s Ark. Do you know where building 25 was? If you know where the Moosejaw pizza place is, we could see that from our hotel. We were over 1.2 miles from the resort – definitely not walking distance.

Although our hotel was recently updated, the room was very tiny, had no phone to call a front desk, no coffee pot (just instant coffee and a microwave) and the floors were cheap laminate wood which made the whole place very loud. We could hear everything, everywhere — the TV on upstairs, the people’s conversations in the hall, the people in the room next to us, the child running up and back on the floor upstairs (sounding like he was in our room). The pictures on the Mt. Olympus website show very spacious rooms with nice furniture. We had a bed, two nightstands, dresser (with missing knobs) a very mini fridge, and a table with mismatched chairs. Then the other part of the room was open space that looked awkward.

This was not the peaceful, relaxing experience we had in mind. We went to see if the pool was open at this hotel and we were pretty disappointed that the pool outside looked to be getting torn out and filled in. Inside the hotel, the windows of the pool room were spray painted black. We looked thru a scrape in the paint and saw the pools were drained and the lounge chairs were all stacked up. So it seems that all of these other hotels that Mt. Olympus has now bought don’t even offer a pool to use at all.

We started to think about how ‘non-relaxing’ our weekend was going to be and decided that the deal was too good to be true and very misleading. We had a great start to the day but this hotel was not going to work for us to stay the night. So we packed it up and headed for home.

So I guess sometimes a good deal that seems to be too good to be true really is just that. And if you want to stay somewhere nice in the Dells, you need to pay for it fully. After my email to them bounced back on their website, I decided to use the contact form although it was meant for happy responses about your stay. Well, they haven’t gotten back to me yet and the only phone number I can find is for booking a room. It shouldn’t be this much time and effort on my end to get to talk to someone if they really want to have great customer relations.