El Cortez Motel

The police and city need to close this place down. The owners lie with every question. The entire place is full of prostitutes, drug dealers, and criminals. I met a tenant at a film release party that she must’ve snuck her way into but she gave me a sob story and having a big heart believed her only for her to steal lots of things from my own place. I called the owners to allow me to give her a chance to explain because again, I have this stupid thing called a heart, only to ask politely to the front desk and the guy bold faced lied to me again and again. The place is infested with bugs. The tenants that put up with it are only doing so because they are probably all criminals and can’t get another place. But, somehow they can afford to pay the 400 weekly rate, which again, I helped her to pay. I’ve been in very bad situations but I would never steal from someone that was trying to help me. The owners of this place are harboring criminals and they know it but try to lie in order to act like they don’t know. Too bad, too sad. Someone please close this place down… America might be a better place when they do.

don´t even think about staying. my wife was infested by bed bugs. not a sanitary place. run by an indian family (india) and it´s pretty bad. She sat on a couch in the room to read a book and that´s where she got them. Even before sitting, we spread a bed sheet over the couch because of the looks of it, but didn´t realize it was infested with bugs. She then found out that after packing her clothes in the suitcase, she had spread the bugs on the rest of her belongings. What a dump.

We checked this out and because of the previous review we asked to see the room before paying the $ 70 they were requesting. I was shocked they were willing to let us do so. This place is TRASHED. They took me up to a second floor room where some tweakers were sitting around with their door open and you could smell the drugs coming out of the room. There was so much trash… like beer cans, cigarette packs, etc. on the stairs I couldn’t believe it. It’s so simple to fix!!!
The room itself was also really surprising. Not kidding, the furniture wasn’t even in place meaning the nightstand looked like it had been pulled out and turned a bit (you can’t just push it back?) big rips in the carpet, stickers on the table with mismatched chairs, all sorts of stains on the walls (including what I HOPE was just chocolate smeared on the wall with a clear hand print) and so on. It was just clear that they don’t care about the place. I went through the motions of checking for bedbugs and didn’t see those but wasn’t about to stay long enough to see if there were roaches (which I’m sure there would have been with the condition of the place in general). If they took any time to do any kind of improvements and maybe train their staff to actually CLEAN the rooms and make them presentable, it probably could be a lot nicer. Sadly, it was the cheapest option on Sepulveda. Sigh.
We decided not to stay there… if that was the ‘model’ room they were showing us, I can’t imagine what a night there would have been like.

We picked El Cortez Motel because it looked attractive from the street as we were driving by. It had cute tiled roofs and we peeked in a room to find walls painted in earth colors and an arched doorway leading to a separate couched area. The owner said he had a non-​smoking room with free Wi-​Fi for a good price. It was only 1 ½ miles from the Sherman Oaks Galleria so I told him I wanted a room and gave him my credit card.
Well, the bullet-​proof glass in the office should have been my first hint. OK, my mistake. When we got our keycard and opened the door to our room, it reeked horribly of cigarette smoke (not just a faint scent), and there was an ashtray on the table. The room was absolutely filthy. The front door and bathroom door were white, but grimy on both sides from dirty hands. The bathroom floor was disgustingly dirty. That’s all I needed to see & smell. I went back to the office, told them that they had given us a smoking room, I had allergies and wanted a refund. He said it was a non-​smoking room, even though there was an ashtray in it. He refused to give me a refund, but said he would give us another room.
The second room was better. It still had an ashtray in it, and still smelled like someone had smoked in it, but not recently. Sadly, this was probably one of their better rooms. It had a new bathroom floor and fixtures, but I could see that they did not understand the concept of cleanliness. It was only superficially clean, you could see «things» already accumulating in the corners. The bath mat hanging over the tub for the bathroom floor was, literally, a thin hand towel. The towels were small & thin, but at least they were clean. There was a moth and a fly in the bathroom. The sheets were clean, but after being in that other room I didn’t trust the sheets, the carpet or the couch. The doors were cleaner, but still had smudges on both sides. There was a piece of a paper napkin hanging out of the front door, where someone had stuffed it into the peephole. The overhead light in the couch room was extremely dim, and the light just inside the front door didn’t work at all. I’m all for no frills, modest accommodations when I just need a quick place to sleep, but the very basic requirement is cleanliness, which this place did not meet. Not even close.
Aside from that issue, the owners were very aloof. They lied to me twice. We had asked for a refund both before & after we had gone out to dinner, before we even used the room. At our second request, they denied that we had asked for a refund a few hours earlier, and said it was now too late. They also said that because it was a weekend, they were full and couldn’t refund my money. Huh? (The parking lot was only about a quarter occupied that night, and early the next morning when we got up). Probably from a history of bad patrons (who else would want to stay in a filthy room?) they were suspicious of everyone to the point they were over-​zealous about protecting theft of their remote controls, yet at the same time they were trying to chase away the customers who would be clean, quiet, respectful of the property, and pay the bill. To all those in this last category, run far away from this place!!!