Griffin Hotel, an official Colonial Williamsburg Hotel

"Completely unreasonable. I accidentally booked 2 nights starting the next day instead of the following week. I immediately realized my mistake and within a few minutes of making the reservation I started working with customer service. I even asked if they would accept my payment as credit toward a stay at their more expensive location nearby. The best they would do was charge me a $402 cancellation fee...the price of the first night's stay. Definitely left a bad taste. I want nothing more to do with this business."

"Super great location and that’s about all the Griffin has to offer. The room is super old, and VERY dated and smelly. We have 2 lamps that do not work, a bubble in wall paper that is obvious water damage so it smells musty, missing a knob on the wood shutter blind and it doesn’t even shut there is an added lock to sliding door but the door itself wouldn’t be locked without added lock. It said first floor with view of pond but you walk in and go down a level so it is in the basement (only 3 rooms down here) with a view of a swampy green cesspool looking thing. It is not a typical hotel, you have to check into the Williamsburg Inn. The griffin gold has no lobby, restaurant or any other normal hotel conveniences barely enough parking. Absolutely a horrible stay. If it wasn’t a 3 hr drive home we would have left. We did look for another hotel but it was sold out because of local festivities and weddings. Do not recommend. Oh and the photos posted DO NOT look like this room at all. If you are given room 3501, RUN!"

"Room was good size with a bathroom and a second sink but sad…cruddy heating system, sink fixtures loose, door locks required multiple swipes, beds need to be replaced. Free breakfast was in a different building a quarter mile away. Not worth over a thousand dollars for three nights. Location was great but there are plenty of other options a short drive away."

"You are booking here not with a hotel, but a large corporation headed by a tobacco oligarch who doesn't care at all about his customers. You call the number and someone tells you one thing in order to get you to reserve a room, only to call again later to hear something else entirely once you've already booked! In the meantime, they emphasize not knowing anything, or nothing being secure or guaranteed, in order to escape any culpability. You ask them about the free tickets they give and no one has any clue what they mean or where they can or cannot be used. If you have special requests, you can write them down, but whether they satisfy them or not, no one knows. No one knows anything. So you cannot trust anything they say, everything is at most a suggestion. This is part of the reason I suspect why they record every conversation, given their slippery business practices and most likely past litigation experiences. The hotels are absolutely overpriced, too. Why everything is so expensive and for-profit in Williamsburg for a historical experience is itself a question, apparently you have to keep the shareholders and executives nice and fat in their numerous houses, but that's a different story. Perhaps the only positive is that in all of the cockroach-ridden, filthy hotels around in Williamsburg this one is supposedly missing the cockroaches in the spaces of their overpriced rooms; the cockroaches are instead sitting at the top of the pyramid sucking money out of the suckers who go and rent rooms here."

"The atmosphere of this hotel was unmatched. All the animals in the area are super friendly. The rooms, however, are in desperate need of TLC. The beds were a little uncomfortable, but it worked for the couple of nights we stayed! Our key stopped working on the first night (could happen at any hotel, no complaint about that), and the staff was super friendly and got the key reprogrammed for us! Overall, the Griffin Hotel is a great place to stay for a weekend or for somebody who would love to experience colonial Williamsburg! Tip: Bring nuts for the squirrels!"