The Hartness House

The Hartness house is not only an amazing little Inn in the woods of Springfield, but it is absolutely PACKED full of history! Tyler was amazing and gave us a tour of the secrets of Hartness House! Ask about the museum and the speakeasy. It is an absolutely beautiful property. Thanks again Tyler!

Hartness House is a beautiful 100-yr.-old home converted to an inn. An institutional compound has been built behind it where most of the rooms are located. My room was clean and quiet. It looked out over a beautiful garden vista. I'll never stay there again because: 1) There are no humans present. This doesn't sound terrible but I learned that having competent, welcoming human beings are important to feeling comfortable in a hotel/inn. 2) The system they use for check-ins is something called Lynx, which at one point informed me that I did not have a reservation, though I had already paid hundreds of dollars for one. Lynx also apparently controls security at the compound. 3) After a long day of driving and business meetings, when I arrived back at my room at 10:30pm, Lynx would not unlock the door. Four tries later, it worked. But with the knowledge that there was no one at a front desk (there is no front desk), no baggage handlers or maintenance or concierge on the premises, this was actually a scary experience. 4) "Check-in/check-out" involves a screen that one doesn't even encounter if one doesn't happen to enter the house, which requires a password. 5) If you enter the house to access the human-less table of muffins and coffee in the morning, there are Louis Armstrong records playing on a device in the lobby - the records are great, but in a deserted house it's eerie, kind of like a horror film. Seems like whoever owns the house took care to restore it and thought they should make some money off it, which is fine. Too bad they don't know enough or care enough about their customers' experience to actually staff the place. But I guess they're "disrupting the hospitality industry". Sigh.

We were very disappointed with this hotel. First we were made to believe, from the online listing, that we were staying in a beautiful home advertised as a mansion yet when we arrived, there we no personal touches. No one was there to greet us (this is the first time this has ever happened to us). From the online listing we thought we were staying in a mansion. Far from it! Our room was down a long hallway where it resembled any other hotel and hotel room. Very basic! We had a porch off the sliding door but no chairs to sit in and relax. The door with a combination lock that was closest to our room was “out of order” so we had to park in the back and walk back up to the front (not a well lit driveway) of the hotel only to have to walk all the way back down a long hallway to get to our room. There was no hair conditioner in the bathroom. Only shampoo. We could have stayed at the Best Western nearby and paid much less for the exact same set up. This is not a true, quaint Bed and Breakfast. If that is what you are looking for, this is not the place for you