My wife and I needed to stay in Milan for one night before departing for a tour the next day. We chose the Ramada Malpensa because it offered a free airport shuttle.
On arrival at the Milan airport, we collected our luggage and looked for free phones to the hotels. There were none, so we tried to place a credit card call after consulting a help desk near the baggage area. We dialed the number as instructed and heard the phone ring. And ring, and ring, and ring. After several minutes the line went dead, and we thought the front desk must have been too busy to answer.
After waiting 10 minutes we tried again - same results.
We went outside and paid a taxi to take us to the hotel. We complained about the problem at check-in, and the front desk clerk told us he was sorry, but he had been in the office the entire morning, with no phone calls. He asked us about the number we dialed, and determined we needed to dial a leading 0 in front of the number we dialed (the lady at the airport help desk didn't tell us about that). He was very apologetic and handled the situation very professionally (but couldn't offer to cover our taxi fare).
That afternoon we were able to take the shuttle into Oleggio, the local village, and back to the airport the next morning.
The rest of our stay at the Ramada was very satisfactory, although the in-hotel restaurant rates were very high.
On our return home, we found the phone company was trying to bill us $42+ for each of our failed calls. We were unable to resolve the issue with the phone company, and protested the billing to our credit card. Although we had a receipt from the taxi, we sent an email to the Ramada for help with a statement from the clerk who worked with us on our arrival.
After one week, we received no reply from the Ramada (using the email posted on the web-site). Another request for help - same results. So even though our desk clerk handled the initial problem very well, we feel Ramada simply didn't care enough to send a simple email (not even an acknowledgment our email was received) to support their customers.
For that reason, we're very disappointed in Ramada Malpensa's customer support, and don't recommend it to others.
