This trip was supposed to celebrate my husband’s birthday and allow us to spend time with local friends in Jackson. Unfortunately, White Buffalo Club is one of the more impressive examples of incompetence and poor business acumen that I have encountered in quite some time. The one star granted here is to acknowledge the solid range of gym equipment and convenient downtown location.
The property markets itself as “luxury” while operational standards quietly collapse in the background. The rooms are VERY poorly soundproofed. Every movement from the room above us came through the ceiling with such force and clarity that it sounded less like neighboring guests and more like a juvenile rhinoceros learning tap dance. Sleep was intermittent at best.
The room design itself also appears to have been created by people who have never actually stayed in a hotel. The shower door opens in such a way that requires you to climb inside before turning the water on unless you enjoy drenching your sleeve and shoulder trying to reach the controls from outside the glass.
It’s the poor service that really stood out, though.
Breakfast, advertised from 7–10 a.m., was not out at 7:30. Food remained locked away, nobody was at the front desk and the only coffee available was from the previous day. I watched a steady stream of increasingly disappointed guests wander downstairs only to discover there was effectively no breakfast service at all. One couple from Alabama told me they could not wait to get home.
The gym bathroom went three consecutive days with an empty hand towel dispenser and no means of drying hands regardless of the hour — morning, afternoon or evening. At some point, repeated negligence stops being an oversight and simply becomes laziness.
The QR code for room service had not been renewed and thus did not work, which felt fairly emblematic of the broader experience: lots of effort put into appearing modern and streamlined, very little effort put into ensuring anything actually functions correctly once guests arrive. Ironically, by the end of the stay, we had reached a point where we actively did not want White Buffalo Club receiving another cent of our money anyway.
Housekeeping was similarly dysfunctional. Despite requesting daily service through both the guest portal and directly with front desk staff, we had to chase and ask for it three separate times. It was during these interactions that we first dealt with a front desk employee named Abby, who seemed genuinely irritated that guests expected the hotel to perform the services it advertises online.
Requests were met with eye-roll energy, vocal fry and the sort of passive-aggressive indifference normally associated with teenagers being asked to unload a dishwasher. The overall staff energy at White Buffalo Club felt less “luxury hospitality” and more “disaffected delinquents supervising a vape shop.” Every interaction carried the unmistakable impression that guests were interrupting something vastly more important such as scrolling Instagram or staring at phones. Attitudes were consistently contemptuous, dismissive and unprofessional, conveying that guests were burdens rather than, jeez, I dunno, the entire reason the hotel exists.
The defining moment, however, came when I became violently ill during the stay. After vomiting repeatedly throughout the Sunday morning and reluctantly canceling my husband’s birthday dinner, my husband explained the situation to the front desk to try and cancel my massage appointment later that day. Abby displayed complete indifference not only toward my wellbeing, but toward the wellbeing of the staff member expected to spend 90 minutes in close proximity to someone actively sick.
Instead, she seemed absolutely hell bent on enforcing a cancellation policy for a comparatively measly couple hundred dollars, delivering the news with the sort of self-importance usually reserved for someone finally being entrusted with hall monitor duties after a lifetime of waiting. The priority was not common sense, discretion or concern for employee safety. It was the apparent thrill of rigidly enforcing policy while exercising one of the few microscopic scraps of authority apparently available to her.
And to be clear: I understand cancellation policies exist. Had the rest of the stay been excellent, I probably would have accepted it and moved on.
But context matters.
Ultimately, after hours of shivering under the blankets and vomiting, I forced myself downstairs to speak with the massage therapist, who immediately indicated that nobody had communicated my illness to her and that she would have been perfectly happy to accommodate the situation had anyone simply exercised basic judgment and informed her. Instead, the hotel managed to create an awkward and deeply uncomfortable interaction for everyone involved purely because the front desk chose rigid policy enforcement over common sense communication.
I subsequently emailed the manager, Bryan, twice regarding the broader hotel experience. He ignored both emails completely, which tells me the culture problem here likely starts at the top.
And before anyone attempts to excuse that level of nonresponse as being “busy,” I have personally managed client communication while flying from Ohio to New York to Madrid to Toulouse during the period when my father fell into a coma and ultimately died. At minimum, acknowledging a guest email — or setting an out-of-office reply directing concerns to another appropriate contact — is not an unreasonable expectation in a professional environment. But then, The White Buffalo Club is anything but that.
Because Bryan ignored me entirely, I reached out to Booking.com directly and ultimately received a $360+ refund. So in the end, White Buffalo Club managed to alienate two guests, generate extensive negative reviews and lose future referrals…over money that I received back anyway.
The truly impressive part is how shortsighted the entire thing was. I have already relayed this experience — and the hotel’s name — to my entire team, many of whom travel constantly for work and regularly exchange hotel recommendations. I have also shared it with local Jackson friends whose family members and visitors routinely book accommodations in the area.
In an apparent effort to “win” a couple hundred dollars, White Buffalo Club instead ensured that a far larger number of future dollars will never arrive in the first place. 🥇
The TL; DR: there are so many better places to stay in Jackson — spare yourself from this clown show!
US
NZ