So, I was recently on a vacation seeing family, and wound up staying at the Ramkota in Rapid City for…raisins having to do with special hotel rates. And well…my experience there had me a trifle on tenterhooks, despite the building being Code compliant, atop me being in a first-floor room with a direct exit to the exterior.
So, the first thing I noticed in the building is that it’s only partially sprinklered. The restaurant and Convention Center II are the only sprinklered wings of the building – Convention Center I, the lobby, and the rest of the hotel are unsprinklered. This is OK by fire code since it’s only a two-story building, albeit a sprawling one, and old at that (it was allegedly originally built in the 1960s as a Howard Johnson’s), but still, it’s not a great look for something that’s supposed to be bigger and better than your average motel.
Second, I noticed some for-sure defective emergency lighting in the building (dead indicator light even), so that was something that was brought to the front desk’s attention. Not great in a building that’s pretty much a maze to navigate (albeit with exits all over), although that stuff I’m sure does die on occasion, and they have been replacing the fixtures with newer ones, as I saw some LED units mixed into the e-light population there.
Third, there is no elevator anywhere in the building. This is a problem because certain amenities, such as the guest laundries, are only present on the second floor of the building, which is a bit of an ADA fail in my book. (I guess the staff would do laundry for disabled customers on request, so it might not be an outright violation, but still, not great.)
Finally, and most worryingly, said guest laundries have naught but a cased opening between them and the corridor. While this technically isn’t a code violation, as not everything with a domestic washer and dryer in it is necessarily considered a “laundry” for the purposes of incidental hazardous area protection in the Codes:
A.16.3.2.1(2)(a) It is not the intent to classify a room with a domestic-
type clothes washer and a domestic-type clothes dryer as a laundry.
and these rooms are small (if they exceed 100ft2, it’s not by much!), it’s still not great, and could be considered an issue were one to put the building under a strict interpretation of the LSC. (It’s doubly worrying because they use gas dryers. While there is a CO detector present in at least the laundry I used, the hazard of a fuel gas leak isn’t covered by that.)
Overall? I’d rather stay at the Alex Johnson – it’s far better located (downtown vs off an Interstate exit where you have to drive to get anywhere to speak of), in a building that’s been better upgraded over the years to the best of my understanding, and quite a bit more charming at that. (Minerva’s serves good food, don’t get me wrong, but there’s an actual Irish pub on the ground floor of the Alex Johnson, and a chocolatier, complete with 24hr vending machine service.)