Traditions Hotel & Spa Johnson City - Binghamton, An Ascend Collection Hotel

“A pleasant return visit to Traditions”

We travel twice a year to Binghamton to visit family who do not have the space to put us up in their home. As a result, this beautiful and comfortable hotel has become our home-away-from-home whenever we stay in Binghamton. For the second time, we booked a Homestead Suite, which offered a sitting… lisää

We travel twice a year to Binghamton to visit family who do not have the space to put us up in their home. As a result, this beautiful and comfortable hotel has become our home-away-from-home whenever we stay in Binghamton. For the second time, we booked a Homestead Suite, which offered a sitting area separate from the bedroom. This area has a sofa, end tables and coffee table, a desk and chair, and a console with a flat-screen TV. The entire suite is spacious and spotlessly clean. A wet bar, Keurig coffee machine, and a refrigerator were nice features, and the bathroom was spacious, with a good supply of thick, fluffy towels and high-quality toiletries. Traditions is located just a short distance from a large commercial shopping area which includes gas stations, shops, restaurants, and a huge Wegmans food store. However, once you drive up the winding road to the hotel, you feel as if you are far out in the country. It’s wonderfully quiet at night. We enjoyed the buffet breakfast which was included in our room rate. It has a wide variety of offerings, including scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, an assortment of breads and bagels, a make-your-own waffle machine, and really good coffee. There was a large bowl of fresh fruit each morning… blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, pineapple, and melon. You don’t normally see ample fresh fruit like this on a hotel buffet, and we enjoyed it very much. The breakfast buffet is staffed each morning by friendly attendants who greet their guests and see that food is replenished when necessary. We had only one glitch in our stay this time. The person who checked us in when we arrived was a young woman named Caitlyn (not sure of the spelling, since there are many different versions of “Caitlyn”). It was an unpleasant experience. She seemed to be irked that she had been disturbed from her reverie, and she offered neither a smile nor a single word of welcome. “Name?” she asked, emotionless, and we replied, explaining that we had reserved for three nights and that we were returning guests. “ID?” she asked, again cold and emotionless, with no indication that she was happy to see us or that she was glad that we had returned. Our interaction with her felt more like a traffic stop where we were being asked to identify ourselves. We were quite taken aback by this perfunctory and unfriendly demeanor, and had we not already stayed at Traditions several times before and had become acquainted with its outgoing and helpful staff (such as Barbara, Jeff, and Monica), we would have thought that we had made a big mistake by choosing Traditions rather than a chain hotel in town. Fortunately, Caitlyn is the exception and not the rule when it comes to the Traditions staff. As a millennial, she probably experiences the world through her phone, which doesn’t require her to look up, acknowledge living human beings, listen to them, and converse with them. She probably has no clue that a guest’s interaction with a staff person behind a hotel reception desk represents the first point of contact between the guest and the hotel, and it quickly sets the tone for how the guest can expect to be treated during the rest of the stay. So to Caitlyn we say: a smile costs nothing but goes a long way in extending a feeling of hospitality and good will, and a few words of welcome require hardly any effort at all but will leave guests feeling seen and appreciated. Traditions still gets full top marks from us, in spite of this one unsettling experience. We can’t devalue our stay simply because of one person’s sour attitude. We’ll be back in the spring, happy to once again enjoy the hotel, its typically warm and engaging staff, and its beautiful surroundings. With luck, we might even find a polite and animated Caitlyn at the reception desk!

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