Hotel Courtyard a Regina

My wife and I stayed at the Courtyard by Marriott for two nights during a side-trip from Saskatoon to see a Roughriders game. We booked three nights in advance via *******, although that reservation was only partly honoured. We arrived a few minutes after the earliest check-in time to be told that they did not have the room that we booked. I appreciate that it was a busy day with the football game that night, but what is a reservation if it doesn’t actually “reserve” the room? The front desk clerk offered us a different room type, which wasn’t an upgrade, but for our purposes was essentially on par to what we had booked. On check-in they explained that they weren’t able to take payment by credit card and asked me to pay via debit card. This may have had something to do with the CrowdStrike global IT outage that was happening that day. I paid $147 that I was asked to pay, via debit, but became concerned because this was only about half of what I was expecting. As I collected my room key and turned to leave, I asked the front desk to confirm that I had a room for two nights. They realized that they had only charged me for one night, but were already processing their next guest. I suggested that I collect my bags from my car, go to my room, and return to the lobby, which allowed them to focus on their next visitor. About 20 minutes later, I returned to the lobby and they confirmed that they had only charged me one night. My debit card payment for the second night failed, as did my wife’s debit card payment (again, likely due to the global IT outage). For whatever reason, they were able to accept a credit card payment (which I suspect they could have done all along), and finally we were checked-in and fully paid. The total cost was about $9 less than the amount expected from my ******* booking. The room itself was a good size with a large TV, black-out blinds and a bar fridge. The bar fridge was a surprise, because we had specifically looked at the hotel listing on ******* to see if it had a fridge. A fridge was not listed, despite other details that you would think would not have needed to be listed “towels”, “bed sheets”, “private bathroom”. We really liked the blackout blinds. I didn’t love the giant pillows, but I appreciate that’s a personal preference. We didn’t use any of the restaurants or other hotel services. They had free parking, which was convenient. They had free wifi, although we couldn’t connect one of our devices. They had a support number to call specifically for wifi problems, but the support agent couldn’t resolve the issue either. I would have rated this property a 3.5 out of 5 if I’d had the option. If we’d had none of the (relatively minor) issues mentioned above, this might have rounded up to a 4/5, but that wasn’t the case, so I consider it to meet expectations in an “average” sort of way.