We drove from Sacramento to Santa Ana and arrived around 4 a.m. Saturday, only to find out our reservation had been canceled after midnight. The lobby was closed, but thankfully a kind receptionist saw us on camera, let us in, and reinstated our booking—she was the only bright spot. The lobby looked decent but was clearly under construction, with paint buckets behind the front desk and other signs of ongoing repairs. After a long 7-hour drive, we finally got to sleep, only to be blasted awake at 6 a.m. by nonstop, deafening construction noise that lasted until nearly noon. At 8 a.m., a different receptionist started calling and banging on our door, telling us we had to move our car or it would be trapped due to parking lot work. They told us to park across the street at another hotel, but that lot was filthy, filled with garbage, and felt completely unsafe. To make it worse, we couldn’t use the front entrance—we had to exit through a back emergency door, go down stairs, and cross a busy street with no crosswalk. The road curved right at that spot, making it nearly impossible to see oncoming traffic. Several times, speeding cars came out of nowhere and nearly hit us. The entire experience was chaotic, stressful, and absolutely unacceptable.
