Hotel du Commerce

Around 9 am on my checkout-day I wanted to access my car in the hotel's garage to get my "wickelfisch", a locally promoted watertight bag that you can store your wardrobe in and then drift down the river Rhein - a famous local summer diversion which on the previous 2 days I was unable to do due to bad weather. Contrary to what I had been explicitly told by the staff earlier, on that morning my room card neither opened the door to the reception, which was still unmanned at that time, nor to the garage. For cases like that there is a terminal for emergency calls next to the door. I called and was told that I would be issued a replacement card but it turned out this didn't work either. Next the operator gave me a code number which also failed to open the hotel door. I angrily walked back to my room (the hotel's apartments are in a separate building) and was lucky the room card at least still unlocked my apartment door. I tried to call the reception but the phone's display said NO SERVICE. One hour before my checkout time I walked back to the reception and told the receptionist of my disappointment about being unable to start my last date in Basel the way I had wanted. She said that the door had broken down but that I could still have used the gate to the garage. I said that I had tried in vain, she insisted that I was wrong, took my card and ran it over the reader only to see the gate did not open. She issued me a new card while I commented that a gesture of good will or a minor compensation in such a case where not only hotel door and gate fail to open, but also the emergency terminal and the room phone are dysfunctional would be a nice gesture. To my big surprise she replied that my request was exaggerated and that she travelled a lot and that in Spain (!) nobody would bother about such an incident. I find this a curious statement from a receptionist in a Swiss hotel with half a dozen technical failures. Obviously, I will never again set a foot in this hotel but I wish its future guests a more pleasant experience with the hotel staff in case something doesn't go quite as planned, payed or promised.

Die Reception-Mitarbeiterin hat mich sehr freundlich begrüsst und abends, trotz angekündigter verkürzter Anwesenheitszeiten, auf mich gewartet. Mein Zimmer im 5. Stock war sehr grosszügig, ruhig und verfügte über eine gedeckter Terrasse. Beim Frühstück habe ich den persönlichen Service geschätzt. Die Lage direkt an der Messe Basel ist ideal und das Hotel einfach per Tram erreichbar (man erhält ein Ticket zur kostenlosen Nutzung des ÖV in Basel).