FORT WAYNE, IN (Indiana's NewsCenter)--
Visitors to Fort Wayne recently could be confused by 2 Quality hotels just 3 miles apart. In March we aired a story about the poor conditions at the Quality Hotel on West Coliseum, less than a week later Choice Hotels removed the hotel from it's chain, but the sign is still up. The new owners of the refurbished Quality Inn on Washington Center Road, say the confusion and the fallout from our story is hurting their business
Rhonda Jacquay/Quality Inn "it's confusing to our customers, I think it's confusing to the community. We are the Quality Inn, they were the Quality Hotel
Hemant Jinwala/Quality Inn said, "we have spent a lot of money fixing up the hotel on the outside and inside, everything in the rooms is new, including carpet, furniture, granite counters. We are not affiliated with that hotel in any way"
The new Quality Inn does operate as a Choice property. After purchasing the former Signature Inn, the owners upgraded everything from carpet to granite countertops in every room, but they say they've had no luck getting the Quality Hotel to take down it's sign.
When we spoke with the Hotel on Coliseum, they told us they've been working on a change, one that customers will notice in two weeks.
Ryan Elijah- In two weeks the Quality Hotel sign will come down on Coliseum and the Quality Hotel will be known as the Fort Wayne Hotel and Fundome, but we wanted to know what progress was made inside and we quickly realized this wasn't the same place we saw nearly 6 months ago
6 months ago we were greeted by mold, a musty smell and a hot tub and pool in poor condition, but here's what we saw this week........ new carpet, new paint, new playset, a completely different looking fundome, that smelled new.
Bob Bastian is part of owner Abe Vaknin's new management team, he knows changing public perception can be a long process.
"it's kind of like when you go to a restaurant and have a bad experience, you're afraid to go back, but people will come here and see it's a completely different place than before. It's a difficult process to repair an image, but this place is coming back" said Bob Bastian.
We couldn't find any on-line complaints about the hotel since May and we also found the hotel had paid enough back taxes to avoid a tax sale with Allen County. Fort Wayne's largest hotel still has plenty of work left, with room renovations underway and a new roof planned, but it seems many of the issues that angered so many of our viewers 6 months ago are being addressed. The restaurant and bar are tentatively scheduled to open in November. Unfortunately for the whistleblower that triggered an OSHA investigation months ago, he has struggled to find work in the industry, despite a ruling by Indiana's Department of Labor stating he was fired for speaking out about safety concerns at the hotel.
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