Back in the day, before a stay at the Westin Columbus my pompous aspirant literary self would’ve been all jazzed up about a stint in a hotel where James Thurber used to be a resident. Thoughts of sitting at the hotel’s Thurber’s Bar, sipping pounding highballs in a catbird seat under prints by the former New Yorker writer and cartoonist, making misogynist comments while rereading my copy of The Thurber Carnival that I picked up at a used bookstore in Istanbul…oh the pretense!

But six months earlier I’d became a dad, so my anticipation had shifted to what I’d read in this press release:

The Westin Heavenly Crib features a white wood finish, fitted blue bottom sheet with a cloud design, white bumper pad and white flounced dust ruffle with delicate bows.

Sweet. Many hotels offer metal cribs; at night my daughter bangs her feet into the bars causing the usually good sleeper to wake up causing us to wake up. So I contacted the Westin via the Twitter to confirm the existence of the Heavenly Crib. The voice at the other end of Westin’s Twitter account verified that the hotel had four of them; I then called  to reserve one, emphasizing its heavenlyness. Done. So when packing we left our travel crib at home.

Checking in a few days later, I was impressed immediately: the bellman was thorough and attentive, the lobby was grand with its marble floors and high ceiling and the clerk at the front desk verified that the Heavenly Crib was already set up in our room. (Disclaimer: While I paid for our stay in this hotel with my own hard-earned bloggin’ money, my wife is a member of its Starwood Preferred Guest program.)

“Great,” my wife said. “It’s so nice not to have to put her in a metal crib where she’d keep banging her legs into the rungs, waking herself up at night.”

“Oh, we don’t have metal cribs like that,” the clerk said.

We got to our room.

Not the Heavenly Crib we'd read about (at The Westin Columbus).

Apparently The Westin Columbus does have cribs like that. No wood, no bumper and chipped paint on the metal at that (we could have cared less about the frills).

After several Tweets with corporate and conversations with the front desk it became clear that The Westin Columbus had four cribs period, none of which were heavenly. The hotel and the voice behind the Twitter account were apologetic about having given us bad info, with a hotel manager even asking if there was any way he could make it up to us (my wife put the kibosh on me asking him to deliver a dramatic reading of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” while I drank my nightly cordial). But bad info tints a stay, especially when it’s given repeatedly and has the potential to lead to a rough night. So while our room was spacious and the staff was attentive, even “The Greatest Man in the World” would have a hard time remembering The Westin Columbus for anything other than being a hotel where, while the bed did not fall during our nights there, the crib did ring.

The Westin Columbus
10 S. High St.
Columbus, OH 43215
614-228-3800

Photo: Zach Everson