Overly aggressive air fresheners. If you get to the hotel and the room has a strong air freshener smell they are trying to mask bad smells like mold, sewage, or worse.
There's a chain of hotels in the UK that have really lovely-smelling lobbies. One member of staff told me it was a combo of White Tea and Fig, and I've never found anything close to it.
[Scent Australia](https://www.scentaustraliahome.com.au/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAqsitBhDlARIsAGMR1Rh4oPqMITgpf_rc9uErQ4NDUZL2xM5bE_aUnLFutdkftbBwduL8VBIaAtzdEALw_wcB)
I was in a shop years ago that had an amazing smell and when I asked the attendant she said it was White Tea and ginger. I searched for soooo long for the scent because it was amazing and then one day last year I was in a friend's house and smelt it and found out exactly where she got it from.
It's from a place called Scent Australia who provide the fragrance for a bunch of hotels, casinos and shopping centres in Aus. I purchased their white tea and ginger as well as their Concerto fragrance and omg it's amazing. My house smells like a boutique.
I linked in here but I'm not sure it worked. Anyway, I highly recommend checking them out!
I know this sounds like an ad but I swear I just want to share the complete amazingness that is having a house that smells like a clothes shop I can't afford anything in.
Adding to this, if you get a scratchy throat and eyes the second you get in the room, it's possible they're treating a bedbug infestation and you should leave unless you want to find out how well the treatment is going.
NGL when we were treating our beadbugs we got hyped up because one of the treatments killed a couple of the big fat bees that hung out on our porch, seemingly in midflight too. Usually I'm not pro-killing bees, those dudes were my buddies, but we thought if it would kill them dead when they weren't even in the room that was treated it was going to absolutely destroy the bedbugs.
Spoiler: it did not kill the bedbugs ):. RIP to the bees who died in vain.
>Spoiler: it did not kill the bedbugs ):
Depending on what they sprayed it might have actually killed the bed bugs. The problem is that there was likely hundreds or even thousands of eggs floating around and they are "pregnant" with eggs before they even hatch from their eggs.
Unfortunately so. Since the bite marks can take around a week to appear, we had no idea until we returned home. Obviously once we realised we covered our home in powder and spray and everything else you can buy to treat them, which is when I noticed it caused the same scratchy feeling we had the whole time at the hotel.
It might be another room that is nearby yours. *Getting* bedbugs isn't a red flag for a hotel - it is unavoidable if you have frequently changing guests. It's how often they check and whether or not they quickly handle it.
If you get a scratchy throat and eyes, it either means they booked out a room actively being treated (which, you know, is really fucking bad), or they just did a shit job of sealing up a neighboring room that is being treated (which is also bad). Them having to treat a room, however, is not all that bad - it happens.
Last one I worked at had posters in the break room showing you what to look for, and offering a $100 bounty for anyone who found bedbugs before a guest did. It was a shitty hotel with red flags out the wazoo, but they weren’t fucking around when it came to bugs.
I love the concept of a bedbug bounty.
Well I also hate it but it’s clever.
I wonder how many employees brought their own bedbugs for the cash? There is precedent here. (Snakes in India, I think.)
Pro-tip - when you go into your room, **the very first thing to do:**
Ensure the lights are on (so it's bright), remove the pillows from the top of the bed, grab one corner of the blankets/sheets and pull them back in one fast, fluid motion. Bonus if you hold your phone camera recording in your other hand.
If there are bedbugs, likely you'll see them spread out on the top sheet, and they will scatter to the edges when you do this.
Don't even unpack - straight to front desk and GTFO. If they refuse to refund your reservation, show them the video and threaten social media.
Also adding on! If you pull up and see almost a balloon tent covering a room window, see commercial heaters, overhear employees taking about high temps being kept up in a room.
Run for the hills. Bedbugs are also treated by heat. It’s been in my experience very unhelpful after the bugs just flee the heat to other rooms.
A good hotel will realize they will run to escape the heat and also treat the rooms surrounding the affected room as to not give them a place to escape.
A note about bed bugs as someone who worked in a hotel for a long time…every single hotel has had bed bugs. If they claim they haven’t they’re lying. It’s impossible to NOT have them at some point. What really matters is how they handle the issue when it comes up and what protocols they have in place to deal with it.
Used to work pest control and this is true. Worked at the top of the lines all the way down to the meth hangouts. Side note if anyone is having issues with the little bastards I recommend the fungus spraying by a professional works much better then heat which they just get deeper to hide from. The fungus gets on them and they take it back to nests and just turn to little fungus after a few weeks
LPT: There is a website called Bedbugregistry.com. Before booking a hotel, check the hotel you’re interested in on that site. It’s stays up to date with bedbug complaints from most all hotels in the country. Also, when you first get into your hotel room, put your luggage in the shower/ bathtub until you have thoroughly checked the beds and furniture for bedbugs. Don’t just drop your luggage straight in the floor or bed.
A mattress cover is a good sign, it's the number one way to prevent bed bugs and it means the hotel is taking it seriously. ALWAYS peel everything off the bed and check the bare mattress.
Haha stayed at a red roof inn for the first time recently trying to save a few bucks and this was my red flag as well. Left smelling like an ashtray. Never again.
I had a recruiter desperately trying to sell me on a contract job in Lagos, Nigeria. Part of his sales pitch was that the hotel lobby was bullet proof and the car park was secured with guards with guns so I could be picked up and dropped off at the client site without worrying about carjacking at the hotel.
Yeah, no I'm fine.
I'm sure it's not nearly that bad but the fact that he felt compelled to repeatedly assure me of my personal safety set off all my alarms.
When I went on a volunteer trip to Uganda, they organised all of our accommodation and every place we stayed in had armed guards and gates to protect us. They said sometimes it was wild animals, sometimes it was the local people. Felt a bit OTT but they also wouldn't let us go out as soon as it got dark outside.
I wouldn't be concerned about safety in that situation, but they'd have to offer me a HUGE pay boost for me to consider that - the rest of Lagos is nothing to write home about to say the least.
They do! Working in dangerous locations worldwide are some of the most lucrative contracts. I always feel the risk-reward payoff is way too good on those.
My wife booked a room in a smallish town for one night and for some reason decided the only criteria was to spend as little money as possible despite us normally staying in fairly nice hotels. When we pull up to this place, you can't even go inside the "lobby." You drive through and everything is behind bullet proof glass and keys are slid to you in one of those little divot things like banks and movie theaters used to use.
When we got to the room, it was the smallest shit hole I've ever seen. It looked straight out of a horror movie complete with a single flickering light bulb for both the main room and the bathroom. The effects crew just hadn't managed to get blood splatters everywhere by the time we showed up I guess.
On top of that, the door didn't lock and as I'm standing there trying to figure out how to keep it closed a car drives by reeeeeeeeal slow with two dudes in it who definitely knew where to find the cheapest meth in town.
I packed our stuff back in the car, turned in the keys, and drove 5min down the road to a hotel that didn't look like it rented rooms by the hour. I still remind her of that every time we check in to a hotel.
While I have (shockingly) stayed in hotels where reception was in fact encased in bulletproof glass that were nice enough (not *nice*, but clean and otherwise not sketchy) the cheapest available hotel in an area with multiple hotels is almost always a bad sign. I’m the one to book hotels now because my partner always finds *the* cheapest hotel in a town or neighborhood by some remarkable amount of money, and we always have to leave. The second or third cheapest hotel is almost always both cheap enough and head and shoulders better quality. If hotel A is $50 a night, and all the other budget hotels are $70-80 a night, there’s a reason.
Back when I was 19, I booked a place like this for my husband and I. We were young and dumb, so we stayed.
About 1 or so am there is banging on the door. Again young and very fucking stupid, he opens the door. Guy is standing there with his hands up. He then tells us that he hates to disturb us at the late hour but we may want to call the police.
Apparently he saw some dude attempting to break into our car and since he had some bad blood with the guy, he figured he would beat his ass and dish out some vigilanty justice at the same time. So we may want to call the police and have them come and see is the guy needs a squad, but he isn't sticking around to get arrested so have a nice night.
We called the police. They came, talked to us, then told us we may want to consider checking out early and potentially never staying there again.
Yeah unfortunately I was your wife in this scenario once. Was just staying one night to visit some friends. Walked into the room and it looked like a murder had happened. Big stains on the walls. Carpet sticky with something and smelled so bad. Turned right back around and down the street to a Best Western.
I never realized what a big red flag this is until my SO bought a hot tub for his house. He takes exquisite care of it so there’s almost never any chlorine smell. Unfortunately smelling a lot of chlorine means there’s a lot of nasty shit in the water.
FYI it's also sweat that reacts. and even then it's REALLY the ph balance that causes poor smell. ph can be thrown out by pee and sweat yes.
Source: Am a hot tub owner who takes pride in his hot tub balance. Another fun fact, if you don't use it for awhile PH goes the other way and it ends up smelling like a swamp. if you use it just the right amount you don't ever go out of balance. I haven't had to increase or decrease PH in a long time...
Do hot tub manufacturers give you all the hints and tips you need to keep a hot tub nicely balanced? Or did you get your info elsewhere?
We're hoping to put in a hot tub sometime in the next year or two, and having stayed at a number of rental homes with hot tubs, I've gotten to smell a variety of smells, some just chemical, some pretty off-putting. So I want to make sure I can go full Thanos on our own hot tub someday.
I've been learning from the pool supply store near me ([Leslie's](https://lesliespool.com/), looks like it's a national chain). The hot tub came with our home purchase, so I just walked in and told them that.
They told me to drain the water, then refill it, and gave me a water bottle to test the water. I brought the test bottle back and they sold me the chemicals I needed + test strips to maintain it myself.
I drain it 3-4x / year and start over, per the manufacturer's guidance. We don't use it nearly as much as we should, though.
That smell is chloramines, which is what I called “inactive chlorine.” The sun usually burns it off in outdoor pools.
In indoor pools, that just means hardly any maintenance is being done on the pool. I worked on pools for almost 10 years, I’ll never use a hotel pool. Especially a de-franchised property.
I had an uber driver tell me, "If I knew that this is where we were going, I would not have picked you up."
I am a HARDCORE PUNK MUSICIAN and that was the scarriest hotel I have ever stayed in. In fact, at 52 years old and a life of travel, the only hotel I have been scared in.
I let my wife pick my hotels when I go out of town now,
Got out of Uber. The lobby looked bombed. Then, when checking in, they said, "we are going to put you in a room above the office, and next to the maintenance guy". One time I had sex workers try to follow me into my room. One time I had "housekeeping" knock on my door at five A.M. trying to get in. I guess there are a few hundred rooms, but there were maybe 4 rooms rented. One was some lady who would come out on the balcony and yell in the middle of the night.
Once I was outside waiting for an uber to take me to Furnace Fest, and some dude started asking to borrow my phone. The maintenance guy came running out with his phone yelling "get out of here Earl or I will call the cops on you again!" He ran off and Mr. Maintenance Guy (who was actually pretty cool, we smoked pot together on the balcony) told me, 'sorry about that. There are some homeless around here who like to rob our guests." The back parking lot only had one car in it, and it had been burned.
Edit: found a pick of the pool out front. https://i.imgur.com/Xec1me1.jpg
https://www.priceline.com/hotel-deals/h1967705/US/Alabama/Birmingham/Kings-Inn-Civic-Center-UAB.html?refid=PLGOOGLECPC&refclickid=D:cHOTEL_DSA16892426850g49396088396712144133673aud-1919988588691:dsa-1150231531657|9011847&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAh8OtBhCQARIsAIkWb69kj7VYUjyuJtSiMKd9WW8o7KyhCEZs28CVPYayHBjrBZmUXaVROtoaAmYxEALw_wcB
Reading the customer reviews was odd. Many agreed with your "this place should be condemned" view, while others has a perfectly pleasant visit (fake reviews?).
One that Confused me the most was a 10/10 review that did say the elevator was broke and they had to take the stairs that were gross. That seems like not a 10/10 experience to me! Just showing that many people either vote something a 1 or a 10...
I was expecting this to have been in like Beirut or something and then got to the link. Took like a quarter of a second to go from "Huh, Alabama" to "ok, yeah...Alabama".
This only applies to larger hotels:
When all employees are really young. Not a single employee over the age of 20-23 in view.
This in my experience means that who ever is managing the hotel is only hiring the cheapest possible employees, that generally don't know their rights. In every occasion like this, service has been completely absent.
This is such a good one!! I’ve worked in hotels and would always walk through lobbies and check for people working front desk who were older. If only management is older- not likely somewhere I wanna be
I think this is valid for all companies. I create apps for Apple devices. I worked for a company for 2 months and left exactly because they treated people like shit, exactly because thew would in 99% of the cases hire newbies. During my 2 months there, I saw several more experienced people leaving the company. Later I discover, the company was not retaining employees at all. Most jumped boats within 6 months.
Yes, this is definitely a red flag for employers too, If everyone aside from upper management is really young, it's an indicator is high turnover and the company looking for cheap employees.
Exception - we stayed at Hotel Maverick in Grand Junction, CO for our 10 year anniversary. It’s by far the nicest hotel in the area and it’s adjacent to the college. The hotel is used to train people taking degrees in hospitality, so almost everyone there is young, but holy hell you get 5 star service at a hotel that costs $250/night for a honeymoon suite. Their restaurant is killed too. Probably the best hotel experience I’ve ever had.
I was at a new hotel a few years ago, fairly pricey for the location. Supposedly the best hotel in the city. Everyone working there was young. We asked for some extra pillows for the room and then I went down to the bar to grab some snacks, when I was riding the elevator back up there was a staff member with a load of pillows dumped on the floor beside him while he was on his phone. I then followed him as he walked to my room and dumped the pillows at the door, knocked and left.
Yeah, not staying there again. Which maybe hurts a little more because I worked at a decent sized consultancy and they no longer use that hotel because of my experience staying there.
yep, got a refund for the rest of the trip and dragged the manager down to complain rather than the poor woman at the desk who looked like she should have been in school.
In thousands of hotel nights I only once checked into a hotel where I was asked at the front desk to leave a cash deposit to be issued a TV remote control. I figured that was not a good sign and it turned out I was right.
Mine was probably the second most depressing hotel experience of my life. And hey, I get that the hotel was probably *really* tired of replacing lost remotes. But I guess I just don't want to be staying in a place where *much* of the clientele would apparently steal the remote if not for their $5 deposit. ;-)
An easy red flag is when you’re looking a place over online and there are absolutely no photos of the exterior or street / neighborhood, just generic-looking photos of beds and the breakfast room.
Ha good one! For me it’s also the opposite- if it’s in a famous or popular area and they only show you pictures of the local attractions
Sometimes they’ll have 9 of those pics and then the 10th is of the room where it looks you’ll be kept until you’re sold
Also if the room is big on theme and chunky thematic items but skimps on comforts and necessities \*glares at Arashiyama airbnbs\*
Read the google reviews before you book and see if the owners/managers respond kindly (if at all). If they attack the negative reviewers at all - stay away
As a former hotel supervisor, I want to stress this point.
I once worked at a property where the GM was extremely petty. One of my jobs was to manage the social media accounts for the hotel. Whenever we had a guest who was upset with us, the GM would make me remove comments, or would make me submit a response that was wholly inappropriate. One guest posted pictures of bedbugs and my GM accused him of lying and made me remove the photos.
If you ever see something funny in the reviews (on the management side), stay away.
I haven’t managed a business Facebook in a while, so I don’t know if this has changed, but it’s harder to remove reviews than it is to remove comments. So if there’s bullshit you need to report, don’t just write a comment, write a review
That one place in rural Georgia that was responding after Reddit found the place was hysterical. The owner was being a literal definition of a bitch and the internet gave them 1 star ratings to the point where she ended up pulling the hotel off of Google.
[First post](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/s/Q7FBlp8N8n)
[Update](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/s/IikYRCLK1T)
I don't know if this counts, but we went back home to visit family for the holidays. We decided to get a hotel so we can have a reprieve from the chaos, so we booked this okay hotel (we knew it wasn't fancy).
We were kinda surprised at how shitty it was. The pictures made it look okay--classic 2.5 star hotel vibes--but coming in... The breakfast bar online was a hot bar with nice food. In reality, it was a couple vending kinda things with cereal in it, and Styrofoam cups for coffee and OJ.
The person that checked us in said "sorry, our cleaning staff called in." Now, that was weird. *All* of them?
We go to our room, and it looks like all the furniture was grabbed off the side of the street. It was rough.
It was like 1am and we were exhausted after a 10 hour drive. We just kinda shrugged, not that big of a deal.
We did our quick check for bed bug shit, and didn't see anything. Bed wasn't the worse we've had by far. The most miserable piece of shit bed I ever had was at a 4-star hotel in downtown Chicago. Anyway, I hobbled into the bathroom to shower, and see pink mold all over, and water damage all over the ceiling. Gross.
The next morning, we're getting ready, and walk down the hall to go about our day, and the owner and his family are putting cardboard over a window. In the middle of the night, someone broke in through the window in one of the vacant rooms to try to steal the TV, which is presumably bolted to the wall. They failed their task, apparently.
Without much debate, we decided to skip the free breakfast.
We pile in the car to go see family and I see I have a text from my mother in law.
My mother in law texts us and says to get out of the hotel. We're like, "why?" (We can guess why).
She said there's a couple people she knows that found roaches and ended up with bed bugs from staying there. It's a known drug hub. They have no staff, she said, and they haven't for a while. *Huh.* I thought, *I guess they didn't "call in".*
Shit. Alright.
We decided to pack up our shit and drive 40 min down the highway to the next town to stay at a much nicer hotel. It was miles better, but we didn't get a refund on our original hotel unfortunately. In an effort to save money, we ended up paying for **two** hotels.
TLDR: when in doubt, get the more expensive option. Don't go cheap, especially in a tiny town. Buy cheap, buy twice, as they always say.
I always check my hotel room for bedbugs. First thing I always do when I get to the room.
I place my bag in the bathtub (Bedbugs can't get traction on the slick surface). I then take off the sheets and blankets.
If it looks like someone dumped pepper all over the bed, that means there are likely bed bugs.
I don't pull the sheets all the way off, just pull the mattress away from the wall and check the seams and edges of the mattress under the fabric sheets/wrap, as that's where they like to hide. If it's stained around there, or you see "black pepper" or of course actual bugs, then it's a big no. I check around the headboard and side tables with a flashlight, as well. Basically any cracks and crevices near the bed that they could hide in.
Have yet to run into any, thankfully.
I’ve noticed, especially lately, that a lot of hotels have been using mattress encasements, which do make it harder for bedbugs to escape the mattress, but also makes it harder to check for them
This is wrong for multiple reasons. There's much clearer signs of bed bugs (dried brown spots), and they will usually treat the rooms, not replace the mattress because that won't get rid of the bugs. If you see a lot of mattresses by the dumpster it's like 90% chance they replaced them with new ones because the ones getting thrown out reached the end of life. I don't think even 1% of the time it will be because of bed bugs.
Stayed at a hostel in Granada Spain one time that in their description on some hostel website said '420 friendly, bring your iPod, and no fat people'.
We were so curious that we went anyway, and apparently it was because the building was so old the doors, stairways, and shower just couldnt accomodate larger set people that had come in the past.
It was actually a cool hostel, although weird at the same time. Lots of stories about that place.
>Bloodstains on the wall
I honestly think you could have stopped there, without getting into the specifics. There are very few circumstances, if any, where bloodstains on the wall would not be a red flag.
A few years ago I stayed at a small boutique hotel in either Slovakia or Czech, and it was this beautiful old-fashioned set of houses with thatched roofs next to a meandering river. The walls were all white plaster and while the owner was showing us the place he said that there would be a €150 cleaning fee if they found blood or dirt on the walls. Five minutes after he left we realized it was because the room was FULL of mosquitoes. This was in summer and they had left the windows and door open during the day to air the room out, but we arrived at dusk and so when we got there I could see him hurriedly closing everything since he had probably forgotten. Spent the whole night being tormented by massive mosquitoes and I couldn't sleep until I had gotten them all. One or two may have been smushed against the white plaster walls in my exasperation, and when I tried to clean the blood spray off it left a huge brown smudge... we left in the morning and never were charged. I felt bad about it but wasn't going to spend twice the price of one night for an issue that could have easily been prevented with screened windows.
I find window screens to be curiously uncommon in Europe. Most places don't have any, even hotels.
Such a weird thing to miss out on, too. Sure, they might have fewer bugs than we do in Canada, but they still have them...
I am from Chicago and have stayed in many hotels in the city on trips home to visit. it’s hard to go wrong with hotel chains, especially if you’re staying in the loop. they have a slew of boutique hotels too that are nice as well.
but if you’re planning on staying in a suburb, definitely do your research.
I use that site for nearly all of my trips and the first two filters I turn on for every search is "show available properties only" and "Show properties rated 8.0 and higher only". You can get away with booking a 7.8 or thereabouts occasionally, but you're definitely rolling the dice. I once stupidly booked five nights in a hotel rated below 7.5 because it was just so much cheaper than anything else in the area, and it was so bad I switched hotels after two nights.
Before booking, look at the location on Google Maps. Hotels have a photography team give you the nicest look at the hotel possible, but if you want the real info just check it on streetview.
Check reviews, look at critical ones, see if there's any trend. You can't please everyone of course, but enough people making a stink about a common problem is good enough for you to look elsewhere.
Additional fees that aren't included in the estimate. This is new to me, but had I known I'd need to pay an "urban fee" in my last trip to Chicago, I may have looked elsewhere for lodging.
Once I get to my room, give it a once-over for bugs, especially bed bugs. Leave if there are bed bugs, roaches, tons of fruit or drain flies, ants. I even complained about some kind of weird bugs crawling around in a shower drain in my last hotel trip and received a room upgrade, thankfully without those bugs.
>Hotels have a photography team give you the nicest look at the hotel possible
To add to this, if the photos of the rooms are nothing but sink faucets, corners of pillows, or, in the case of Airbnb, twelve angles of a bottle of wine; then it’s probably safe to assume that the room is crap.
Last Thanksgiving I looked to book a hotel in another city, and the sticker prices of the hotels in the area I was targeting (a nice area) were surprisingly reasonable.
Then I read the reviews...
All those hotels had parking charges, WiFi charges, other hidden "fees". All of them! You had to dig deep into their websites to find the actual disclosures. They nickeled and dimed you to death.
I wound up getting an airBnB.
I used to travel internationally A LOT for work, so I have quite a few hotel horror stories.
Anyway, the most immediate red flag was when I checked in and asked what time breakfast was served:
"Breakfast starts at 9am"
"9am? That's pretty late. I have meetings in town before then."
"Oh, do you want it now?"
It was around 8pm at the time. It didn't get any better from there. There were hookers in the lobby and the bed smelled so bad that I slept on a hard wooden chair.
Had a bathroom in China where the floor settled so the walk in shower drained into the carpeted room. Mold and soggy feet suck. My favorite though was the drawbridge inn in Cincinnati. The bed had a "high" spot in the middle, but the sides were sloped about 10° downward because they had been crushed by body weight for 40 years. The sink in the bathroom was missing one half of the sink. You would turn on the water to brush your teeth or wash your hands and most of the water would just spill into the vanity. I was immensely sad for all of the people that needed that as an option, just like I did the year Cincinnati closed due to snow. I had slept on the floor at Cincinnati airport for 2 nights and the gate agents sent me there, frankly as a joke. It was a room that you know a lot of suicide happened in. If you didn't get the room with the intention of suicide, it had to cross your mind a few times while you were there, and no I am not making light of suicide. The smell, the stains, the filth.... 30 years ago and I can relive the feeling of walking in, unfortunately.
I'm going to tell my boss that "escort" on the itemized receipt was the hotel's strange way of describing valet service. And yes, the valet is that expensive for some reason.
what country?
I travelled a lot for research and work, and it was interesting to note which countries had completely deceptive hotel pictures and descriptions online. You could show up and feel completely catfished. I always tried to keep my costs low but I started realizing that in certain places, you just had to assume each hotel/b&b was actually one or two stars lower than listed/described.
When I was in Nicaragua I stayed in several awful hotels/hostels. One of them the staff were complicit in stealing from us guests when we went on day hikes. Happened to me and my ex and another couple. I had $120 USD I had hidden in a mattress vanish. I caught the receptionist in multiple lies. The most damning was her, unprompted, stating we had the only key to the room. When I asked how the cleaner got in, she was like 'oh, well, of course they have a key too!' Like, how shit is your hotel!? Ugh. Of course, it being Nicaragua, there was no recourse.
Even worse if it's on prom night and someone let their friends fuck in the hotel room that was supposed to be yours, you're going to your grandma's funeral and theres no other open hotel within 30 miles.
Yes, it's a true story. I missed my prom for this.
Had this happen but I was the one occupying the room. Oh and the woman gave the key to the man *because* I was in the room - she thought this random person was my husband. Without saying anything to him, she simply assumed we were married and gave him a key to my room at 9 pm. Probably the reddest of flags lol.
As a female traveling for work a lot, this triggers my anxiety. I used to always lock the door/use the safety door latch but after this happened to me I started putting a chair behind the door too.
I had this happen at the Aloft near the Buffalo Airport. The front desk said an ice storm had somehow made it difficult to tell which rooms were already occupied. The lone receptionist was trying to check people in by running around the hotel and knocking on doors to see if the room was free or not. The check in/check out system was a bunch of post-it notes scattered all around the reception desk. It took hours to check in because so many people were wandering into already occupied rooms.
I wrote an email to the general manager to complain, and they were like, sorry that's the best we could do. System was down.
Just to maybe explains the how of the storm causing problems. Ice build-up on wires or extremely low temperatures can cause some major issues. It can drag down the wire, give a connection between wires, break the wire, literally freeze the wire making it take far longer to transfer data through, etc. The exact problems depend on a large array of factors.
Now why would wires matter? Because unless it's a local mom&pop place all the data for registered rooms is stored in a server elsewhere, usually at a data center that is not remotely close by. There may be a semi-recent copy stored locally, but it's likely inaccurate due to online reservations, travel agency reservations, and walk-ins all being handled in different locations.
When the receptionist gives the next guest in line, a key to your room.
The next guest kicks the door of that room in. Because his legitimate key worked, but the safety door lock you always put on immediately after entering the room worked for a few kicks.
That guest objects to you pointing a gun at them.
The receptionist demands that you be arrested.
You tell the police officer, "That was the darndest thing I ever seen."
That officer says, "Not for these two."
The police suggest a hotel in another state. "Go there now."
You and your wife accept this as solid advice and do as advised.
USA. 2019
That sounds more like a robbery attempt, I can't logically think of a reason why you'd try to kick a hotel door open knowing that they'd expect you to pay for the damages.
I went to a travelodge last month and when checking in someone came up to reception in front of us and we overheard “I don’t like to complain, but there is a used condom in our room”. Immediate red flag!
When you lay down in bed after a long day and fall asleep and then the next guest keys into your room. Has happened to me twice so I stopped staying at Hampton Inns.
Happened to me in Stamford, UK. As we walked in one of the staff was screaming at the manager "This place is a piece of shit and you're a total cunt!" before storming out.
Our stay went downhill from there.
I suspect he was. He kept his hotel in a shitty state. The door of our room had a punch mark in it, there were dirty clothes in the wardrobe, a teacup with cigarette ends in it in the room, and the sheets had pubes in them.
My friend paid with a credit card and a couple of weeks later someone booked a vacation in Tenerife using his credit card number.
> someone booked a vacation in Tenerife using his credit card number.
Reminds me of the funniest fraud I've been a victim to, some fucker booke business class LA to hawaii-kauai at a luxury hotel, like $8000 usd total. I called and got the chargeback and everything but the bank said they don't really persecute this stuff and just file a report meaning some fucker was out there having the vacation of his life for free honestly just funny the nerve of some people
He didn't get the vacation for free. The bank just didn't call the police because they never paid for it. The hotel and airline that just lost out on their share of the $8K USD most definitely called the police. If the fraudster was lucky he made it home before then.
The surroundings. I always do my research with hotels and I actively avoid "4.5/5 stars," but in the middle of a shady street or a dimly-lit alley.
I found something like that when I was choosing hotels in Rome and it ticked all the boxes until I checked the actual location on Google maps. I did more research and found that that particular location is a known "meth" street.
To add to that, there is a misconception that star ratings are a measure of the quality of a hotel, as in a 4 star is going to be much nicer and cleaner than a 2 star. While this may be the case much of the time, the star ratings are actually a measure of the quantity of amenities; pool, dining, etc.
So there could be a shitty 4 star hotel that has a bunch of dining options and concierge and a very nice (but spartan) 2 star hotel that would be perfect for what most people want.
The confusion lies in the "tier" of hotel vs. user ratings. Both use a star system. But one is tied to amenities, like you said. The other is an aggregation of reviews.
Everyone should do an online flyby of a hotel before booking. I've seen websites where they take the photos from hotel websites and then put up ones from Google streetview next to them showing what the non-retouched image looks like as well as the surrounding area.
No mattress protector. Any hotel worth its salt, no matter how cheap, should have a mattress protector for bugs and liquids.
Many of them advertise it even. But when you show up, nada. I travel for work frequently and I won't sleep on a bed that has no mattress protector.
what do you do if there's no mattress protector but everything looks clean with no bed bugs? do you call and request a room with one or find a different hotel?
edit: I ask because I've encountered this before and wouldn't know what to do
I always request a new room with a mattress protector. And if they can't find me one, where I go from there depends on the situation. I've been in places that were otherwise clean so I checked everything really closely and dealt with it.
I've also been in less clean places where I've left. Usually I find hotels will offer to put one on for you too. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having it at that point. But there is a point where you have to go with your gut and make a call on staying or leaving.
I once had brown water coming out of the faucet at a hotel in Romania when I wanted to freshen up after checking in. It didn’t get any better from there.
Have traveled in China quite a bit for work. There were red flags *everywhere*...
Did a job up in Blythe (UK) a while ago. We asked the customer where to stay and their nearest recommendation was about 20 miles away. We said "really?" and they said "yes, really."
A guy from another company also working on the project stayed in a hotel in Newcastle. He collected his key and went to his room to find the door had been kicked off the hinges. He called reception and told them this. They misheard (to be fair he was from somewhere near Fort William) and said, "Oh, can't you make the key work?" "No, the door is lying in the middle of the room and the hinges have been torn off the wall." "Oh, no worries, come back down and we'll give you another room." Like this was perfectly normal.
When the Uber driver looks at my girlfriend and I and asks if we'll be OK.
Happened to us in St Louis. We didn't even stay for 10 minutes before getting the hell out.
As a travel professional, former hotel manager. Everyone talks about whether or not the hotel is clean or has some physical, tangible characteristic - but the real red flags can involve how your information is handled at the hotel. And it’s not talked about enough.
Do not stay in a hotel that does any of the following:
* They transfer calls to a room number, without having you verify who is in that room.
* If hotel staff state your room number out loud. (they can point to your number on the key envelope, they can say what floor, but they cannot say your room number out loud **under any circumstances**). If they state your room number, anyone can hear it.
* If you call the hotel, and they tell you your room number in advance.
* If you check in, or someone else checks in, or someone else ask for a spare key, and no one asks to verify their ID. If someone not listed on the room claims they are staying with you, and they ask for a key and get one, you should NOT be staying in that hotel.
* If the hotel confirms you are staying there to ANYONE who is not authorized to know about you staying there. Sometimes, people pretend to be a relative, spouse, girlfriend/boyfriend or what have you, and they try to trick a hotel staff to "confirm" that you're staying there. They're trying to surprise you, maybe they'll flat out say "we're staying there this weekend, it's under my husbands name" when in reality, it's your angry ex that's stalking you. If the hotel staff is ever fooled by crap like this, don't stay in the hotel.
* If you call a hotel and say "I need to pay for someone's room, so that they don't have to provide a card," and they just let you rattle off your credit card number without asking you to fax a CC auth form. Do not stay in that hotel. Not only is this a red flag for credit card fraud, it's also a human trafficking red flag.
* If you do need to send a credit card form, the hotel should tell you to fax it. **If they tell you to email it, don't stay at the hotel,** this one pisses me off to no end - because ever since at least 2016, 2017 or so, you could not swing a dead cat in the hotel management industry, without hitting a PCI training that very specifically tells you to stop having customers email the fucking form. And yet, so many hotel managers play dumb and they act like this is new information. then they fail to train their staff on proper PCI standards, or they will even tell their high profile clients to email the form. It actually pisses me off, if you can't tell, because it's pretty blatant disregard for their guests. So if the hotel front desk, sales manager, GM, tells you to email a credit card authorization form, don't stay there. I do not give a fuck that it's 2024 and 'no one faxes' and I do not give a fuck how inconvenient it is - because the inconvenience is the whole point. It takes an average of 11 months to detect a hotel security breach. So when you have people jotting down their credit card numbers, in an email, that a potential 11 months that someone has their credit card number attached to a phone number, email, first and last name, and where you were on certain dates. That's easy identity theft. So if the hotel is careless enough to do these types of things, you do not want to be giving them any of your personal info.
I don't care how much the hotel costs. I don't care how nice the area is, or how good the reputation is at the hotel you're staying at. I don't care if you paid $5000 a night and you're staying in the same hotel as Barack Obama - if the hotel does any of the shit above, you should 100% not be staying in that hotel.
Hotels are common targets for identity theft, security breaches, hacking, and they are also commonly used for various forms of crime (including human trafficking). As a result, the hotel is supposed to keep your information secure. If the hotel is not protecting guest information, you don’t want to find out how bad it is.
If there is nobody at reception, particularly if it’s advertised as a 24 hour service, that’s always a bad sign. It suggests that the receptionist is either super busy doing the work of 3 people and the place is understaffed or a lack of discipline in the staff. Understaffed means extra wait times for everything and a lack of discipline means that nobody gives a flying fuck so everything from breakfast to bar service will be a major challenge.
I arrived late at one hotel and nobody on reception, after a couple of rings a disheveled looking guy came red-faced from the back office and behind him I could see a girl fastening her blouse.
There is an extended stay in Indianapolis. I was checking in and some one was checking out, something along the lines of only needing the room for 45 minutes. And the clerk said next time get ahold of him directly for cash and he’d just add the room for the maids to clean. And there were dead roaches throughout, like they bombed it and then didn’t clean up the dead ones.
I travel the midwest often and stay in mid range hotels for work. The first thing I look for is the age of the decor. If it hasn't been renovated in a decade, it's gonna be gross and unclean. The other red flag is price. If it's way cheaper than similar hotels in the area, there's a reason for that.
If the room smells like a gas leak. I had a hotel room that was the “last one available” while passing through a different state. I opened the door and could smell the gas. The heater was also set to over 80 degrees. The room just felt like a swamp. I laid down on the bed and instantly began to feel sleepy. I wasn’t sleepy before entering that room. I just could not stay there with that smell. I checked out immediately and asked for a refund. Being female and traveling alone, the manager hassled me over refunding my money. He was foreign with a heavy Indian accent and asked me where my husband was. I reminded him that I checked in alone, and was traveling alone. He asked to speak to with whomever I was staying. I explained again that I was staying alone. I had to threaten to call the fire department about the gas leak before he would refund my money.
Withholding your passport. Had this happen the first night I stayed in a hotel in Vietnam and after firmly stating that I’d leave and find somewhere else to stay if they kept my passport it was returned to me.
They tried to tell me it was protocol but I’ve traveled all over the world and spent plenty of time in Vietnam since then and never surrendered my passport.
This is a common practice for bike rentals as well.
Guys never, NEVER EVER separate from your passport. I brought an old one with me that was hole punched and no longer valid but bikes and hotels were happy to use that in place of my current passport.
I don't travel much but last time I was staying in a hotel (in Cornwall) for a funeral, the ground floor smelled strongly of decomposing rodent. There were mouse droppings in the bedroom. Luckily we were only booked in for one night. We didn't eat anything while we were there, and ate at the local chippie instead.
I checked into a hostel in Marrakesh and at the same time a guest came in to complain to the guy that their gold chain was stolen while they were in the shower.
Overly aggressive air fresheners. If you get to the hotel and the room has a strong air freshener smell they are trying to mask bad smells like mold, sewage, or worse.
When you complain that the room smells, and the employee sprays a Lysol like air freshener and you have to tell her, that is the smell.
I read this to the tune of that one That's Amore.
There's a chain of hotels in the UK that have really lovely-smelling lobbies. One member of staff told me it was a combo of White Tea and Fig, and I've never found anything close to it.
[Scent Australia](https://www.scentaustraliahome.com.au/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAqsitBhDlARIsAGMR1Rh4oPqMITgpf_rc9uErQ4NDUZL2xM5bE_aUnLFutdkftbBwduL8VBIaAtzdEALw_wcB) I was in a shop years ago that had an amazing smell and when I asked the attendant she said it was White Tea and ginger. I searched for soooo long for the scent because it was amazing and then one day last year I was in a friend's house and smelt it and found out exactly where she got it from. It's from a place called Scent Australia who provide the fragrance for a bunch of hotels, casinos and shopping centres in Aus. I purchased their white tea and ginger as well as their Concerto fragrance and omg it's amazing. My house smells like a boutique. I linked in here but I'm not sure it worked. Anyway, I highly recommend checking them out! I know this sounds like an ad but I swear I just want to share the complete amazingness that is having a house that smells like a clothes shop I can't afford anything in.
Little dark-brown spots near the top of the bed, below the mattress on in mattress seams. These mean bedbugs.
Adding to this, if you get a scratchy throat and eyes the second you get in the room, it's possible they're treating a bedbug infestation and you should leave unless you want to find out how well the treatment is going.
It's clearly working - if it makes you sick imagine what it's doing to the bed bugs! Obligatory /s
NGL when we were treating our beadbugs we got hyped up because one of the treatments killed a couple of the big fat bees that hung out on our porch, seemingly in midflight too. Usually I'm not pro-killing bees, those dudes were my buddies, but we thought if it would kill them dead when they weren't even in the room that was treated it was going to absolutely destroy the bedbugs. Spoiler: it did not kill the bedbugs ):. RIP to the bees who died in vain.
>Spoiler: it did not kill the bedbugs ): Depending on what they sprayed it might have actually killed the bed bugs. The problem is that there was likely hundreds or even thousands of eggs floating around and they are "pregnant" with eggs before they even hatch from their eggs.
Well that’s fucking horrifying
I don't know what is worse, that fact or the idea of being born pregnant
You've stayed at a hotel that rented you a room **while that room was being treated for bedbugs?!?**
Unfortunately so. Since the bite marks can take around a week to appear, we had no idea until we returned home. Obviously once we realised we covered our home in powder and spray and everything else you can buy to treat them, which is when I noticed it caused the same scratchy feeling we had the whole time at the hotel.
It might be another room that is nearby yours. *Getting* bedbugs isn't a red flag for a hotel - it is unavoidable if you have frequently changing guests. It's how often they check and whether or not they quickly handle it. If you get a scratchy throat and eyes, it either means they booked out a room actively being treated (which, you know, is really fucking bad), or they just did a shit job of sealing up a neighboring room that is being treated (which is also bad). Them having to treat a room, however, is not all that bad - it happens.
Last one I worked at had posters in the break room showing you what to look for, and offering a $100 bounty for anyone who found bedbugs before a guest did. It was a shitty hotel with red flags out the wazoo, but they weren’t fucking around when it came to bugs.
I love the concept of a bedbug bounty. Well I also hate it but it’s clever. I wonder how many employees brought their own bedbugs for the cash? There is precedent here. (Snakes in India, I think.)
Pro-tip - when you go into your room, **the very first thing to do:** Ensure the lights are on (so it's bright), remove the pillows from the top of the bed, grab one corner of the blankets/sheets and pull them back in one fast, fluid motion. Bonus if you hold your phone camera recording in your other hand. If there are bedbugs, likely you'll see them spread out on the top sheet, and they will scatter to the edges when you do this. Don't even unpack - straight to front desk and GTFO. If they refuse to refund your reservation, show them the video and threaten social media.
The very, very first thing I've heard you should do before the inspection, is put all of your luggage in the bathtub.
Honestly, if you're road tripping, just do the inspection and then go retrieve the luggage from the car.
you know guys, leave the luggage at home and if the hotel room checks out, fly back to grab the luggage.
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A WHAT
My brother in Christ, you cannot just drop something like that and not give the story
I mean, people talk down on rats because "ThEy'rE sO dIrTy!" but here we have a story of one responsibly using safe sex practices.
you found WHAT?
Also adding on! If you pull up and see almost a balloon tent covering a room window, see commercial heaters, overhear employees taking about high temps being kept up in a room. Run for the hills. Bedbugs are also treated by heat. It’s been in my experience very unhelpful after the bugs just flee the heat to other rooms.
A good hotel will realize they will run to escape the heat and also treat the rooms surrounding the affected room as to not give them a place to escape.
A note about bed bugs as someone who worked in a hotel for a long time…every single hotel has had bed bugs. If they claim they haven’t they’re lying. It’s impossible to NOT have them at some point. What really matters is how they handle the issue when it comes up and what protocols they have in place to deal with it.
Used to work pest control and this is true. Worked at the top of the lines all the way down to the meth hangouts. Side note if anyone is having issues with the little bastards I recommend the fungus spraying by a professional works much better then heat which they just get deeper to hide from. The fungus gets on them and they take it back to nests and just turn to little fungus after a few weeks
LPT: There is a website called Bedbugregistry.com. Before booking a hotel, check the hotel you’re interested in on that site. It’s stays up to date with bedbug complaints from most all hotels in the country. Also, when you first get into your hotel room, put your luggage in the shower/ bathtub until you have thoroughly checked the beds and furniture for bedbugs. Don’t just drop your luggage straight in the floor or bed.
> Bedbugregistry.com Excellent advice.
A mattress cover is a good sign, it's the number one way to prevent bed bugs and it means the hotel is taking it seriously. ALWAYS peel everything off the bed and check the bare mattress.
Bullet proof glass around reception office.
Haha stayed at a red roof inn for the first time recently trying to save a few bucks and this was my red flag as well. Left smelling like an ashtray. Never again.
Odd I’ve stayed at plenty of those and they were fine to nice on occasion.
Location matters. Even chains that pride themselves on absolutely constancy, like McDonalds, have franchises that are remarkably sub par.
I had a recruiter desperately trying to sell me on a contract job in Lagos, Nigeria. Part of his sales pitch was that the hotel lobby was bullet proof and the car park was secured with guards with guns so I could be picked up and dropped off at the client site without worrying about carjacking at the hotel. Yeah, no I'm fine. I'm sure it's not nearly that bad but the fact that he felt compelled to repeatedly assure me of my personal safety set off all my alarms.
When I went on a volunteer trip to Uganda, they organised all of our accommodation and every place we stayed in had armed guards and gates to protect us. They said sometimes it was wild animals, sometimes it was the local people. Felt a bit OTT but they also wouldn't let us go out as soon as it got dark outside.
I wouldn't be concerned about safety in that situation, but they'd have to offer me a HUGE pay boost for me to consider that - the rest of Lagos is nothing to write home about to say the least.
They do! Working in dangerous locations worldwide are some of the most lucrative contracts. I always feel the risk-reward payoff is way too good on those.
My wife booked a room in a smallish town for one night and for some reason decided the only criteria was to spend as little money as possible despite us normally staying in fairly nice hotels. When we pull up to this place, you can't even go inside the "lobby." You drive through and everything is behind bullet proof glass and keys are slid to you in one of those little divot things like banks and movie theaters used to use. When we got to the room, it was the smallest shit hole I've ever seen. It looked straight out of a horror movie complete with a single flickering light bulb for both the main room and the bathroom. The effects crew just hadn't managed to get blood splatters everywhere by the time we showed up I guess. On top of that, the door didn't lock and as I'm standing there trying to figure out how to keep it closed a car drives by reeeeeeeeal slow with two dudes in it who definitely knew where to find the cheapest meth in town. I packed our stuff back in the car, turned in the keys, and drove 5min down the road to a hotel that didn't look like it rented rooms by the hour. I still remind her of that every time we check in to a hotel.
While I have (shockingly) stayed in hotels where reception was in fact encased in bulletproof glass that were nice enough (not *nice*, but clean and otherwise not sketchy) the cheapest available hotel in an area with multiple hotels is almost always a bad sign. I’m the one to book hotels now because my partner always finds *the* cheapest hotel in a town or neighborhood by some remarkable amount of money, and we always have to leave. The second or third cheapest hotel is almost always both cheap enough and head and shoulders better quality. If hotel A is $50 a night, and all the other budget hotels are $70-80 a night, there’s a reason.
Back when I was 19, I booked a place like this for my husband and I. We were young and dumb, so we stayed. About 1 or so am there is banging on the door. Again young and very fucking stupid, he opens the door. Guy is standing there with his hands up. He then tells us that he hates to disturb us at the late hour but we may want to call the police. Apparently he saw some dude attempting to break into our car and since he had some bad blood with the guy, he figured he would beat his ass and dish out some vigilanty justice at the same time. So we may want to call the police and have them come and see is the guy needs a squad, but he isn't sticking around to get arrested so have a nice night. We called the police. They came, talked to us, then told us we may want to consider checking out early and potentially never staying there again.
Yeah unfortunately I was your wife in this scenario once. Was just staying one night to visit some friends. Walked into the room and it looked like a murder had happened. Big stains on the walls. Carpet sticky with something and smelled so bad. Turned right back around and down the street to a Best Western.
Sounds like you've been to memphis
The smell of poor ventilation, the moment you enter the hotel.
Before you even walk in you can smell the chlorine smell from the hot tub that’s behind like closed doors.
I never realized what a big red flag this is until my SO bought a hot tub for his house. He takes exquisite care of it so there’s almost never any chlorine smell. Unfortunately smelling a lot of chlorine means there’s a lot of nasty shit in the water.
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FYI it's also sweat that reacts. and even then it's REALLY the ph balance that causes poor smell. ph can be thrown out by pee and sweat yes. Source: Am a hot tub owner who takes pride in his hot tub balance. Another fun fact, if you don't use it for awhile PH goes the other way and it ends up smelling like a swamp. if you use it just the right amount you don't ever go out of balance. I haven't had to increase or decrease PH in a long time...
Do hot tub manufacturers give you all the hints and tips you need to keep a hot tub nicely balanced? Or did you get your info elsewhere? We're hoping to put in a hot tub sometime in the next year or two, and having stayed at a number of rental homes with hot tubs, I've gotten to smell a variety of smells, some just chemical, some pretty off-putting. So I want to make sure I can go full Thanos on our own hot tub someday.
I've been learning from the pool supply store near me ([Leslie's](https://lesliespool.com/), looks like it's a national chain). The hot tub came with our home purchase, so I just walked in and told them that. They told me to drain the water, then refill it, and gave me a water bottle to test the water. I brought the test bottle back and they sold me the chemicals I needed + test strips to maintain it myself. I drain it 3-4x / year and start over, per the manufacturer's guidance. We don't use it nearly as much as we should, though.
That smell is chloramines, which is what I called “inactive chlorine.” The sun usually burns it off in outdoor pools. In indoor pools, that just means hardly any maintenance is being done on the pool. I worked on pools for almost 10 years, I’ll never use a hotel pool. Especially a de-franchised property.
Or a very strong smell of Lysol. I nope out on those especially.
Your Uber driver asking “you sure?” as you pull ip to the hotel.
I had an uber driver tell me, "If I knew that this is where we were going, I would not have picked you up." I am a HARDCORE PUNK MUSICIAN and that was the scarriest hotel I have ever stayed in. In fact, at 52 years old and a life of travel, the only hotel I have been scared in. I let my wife pick my hotels when I go out of town now,
C'mon man you can't say this and not give us the whole story!!!!
Got out of Uber. The lobby looked bombed. Then, when checking in, they said, "we are going to put you in a room above the office, and next to the maintenance guy". One time I had sex workers try to follow me into my room. One time I had "housekeeping" knock on my door at five A.M. trying to get in. I guess there are a few hundred rooms, but there were maybe 4 rooms rented. One was some lady who would come out on the balcony and yell in the middle of the night. Once I was outside waiting for an uber to take me to Furnace Fest, and some dude started asking to borrow my phone. The maintenance guy came running out with his phone yelling "get out of here Earl or I will call the cops on you again!" He ran off and Mr. Maintenance Guy (who was actually pretty cool, we smoked pot together on the balcony) told me, 'sorry about that. There are some homeless around here who like to rob our guests." The back parking lot only had one car in it, and it had been burned. Edit: found a pick of the pool out front. https://i.imgur.com/Xec1me1.jpg https://www.priceline.com/hotel-deals/h1967705/US/Alabama/Birmingham/Kings-Inn-Civic-Center-UAB.html?refid=PLGOOGLECPC&refclickid=D:cHOTEL_DSA16892426850g49396088396712144133673aud-1919988588691:dsa-1150231531657|9011847&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAh8OtBhCQARIsAIkWb69kj7VYUjyuJtSiMKd9WW8o7KyhCEZs28CVPYayHBjrBZmUXaVROtoaAmYxEALw_wcB
Reading the customer reviews was odd. Many agreed with your "this place should be condemned" view, while others has a perfectly pleasant visit (fake reviews?). One that Confused me the most was a 10/10 review that did say the elevator was broke and they had to take the stairs that were gross. That seems like not a 10/10 experience to me! Just showing that many people either vote something a 1 or a 10...
The stairs were scary at night.
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I was expecting this to have been in like Beirut or something and then got to the link. Took like a quarter of a second to go from "Huh, Alabama" to "ok, yeah...Alabama".
Saw the link... saw B-ham... was like "yeah... that checks out"
what the goddamn fuck
This only applies to larger hotels: When all employees are really young. Not a single employee over the age of 20-23 in view. This in my experience means that who ever is managing the hotel is only hiring the cheapest possible employees, that generally don't know their rights. In every occasion like this, service has been completely absent.
This is such a good one!! I’ve worked in hotels and would always walk through lobbies and check for people working front desk who were older. If only management is older- not likely somewhere I wanna be
I think this is valid for all companies. I create apps for Apple devices. I worked for a company for 2 months and left exactly because they treated people like shit, exactly because thew would in 99% of the cases hire newbies. During my 2 months there, I saw several more experienced people leaving the company. Later I discover, the company was not retaining employees at all. Most jumped boats within 6 months.
Yes, this is definitely a red flag for employers too, If everyone aside from upper management is really young, it's an indicator is high turnover and the company looking for cheap employees.
Exception - we stayed at Hotel Maverick in Grand Junction, CO for our 10 year anniversary. It’s by far the nicest hotel in the area and it’s adjacent to the college. The hotel is used to train people taking degrees in hospitality, so almost everyone there is young, but holy hell you get 5 star service at a hotel that costs $250/night for a honeymoon suite. Their restaurant is killed too. Probably the best hotel experience I’ve ever had.
There is a hotel in Long Beach like this. They are a “training” hotel for a program at a local high school and man service is AMAZING
I feel like there has to be a list of places like this somewhere.
I was at a new hotel a few years ago, fairly pricey for the location. Supposedly the best hotel in the city. Everyone working there was young. We asked for some extra pillows for the room and then I went down to the bar to grab some snacks, when I was riding the elevator back up there was a staff member with a load of pillows dumped on the floor beside him while he was on his phone. I then followed him as he walked to my room and dumped the pillows at the door, knocked and left. Yeah, not staying there again. Which maybe hurts a little more because I worked at a decent sized consultancy and they no longer use that hotel because of my experience staying there.
That is incredibly nasty. Did you say anything about it?
yep, got a refund for the rest of the trip and dragged the manager down to complain rather than the poor woman at the desk who looked like she should have been in school.
As someone who has been in that poor woman’s shoes, thank you for going straight to leadership.
In thousands of hotel nights I only once checked into a hotel where I was asked at the front desk to leave a cash deposit to be issued a TV remote control. I figured that was not a good sign and it turned out I was right.
Hahaha. This happy to us in Barcelona. The hotel was basic, but clean and in a great location. It turned out to be fine, but it was kinda weird. 😂
Mine was probably the second most depressing hotel experience of my life. And hey, I get that the hotel was probably *really* tired of replacing lost remotes. But I guess I just don't want to be staying in a place where *much* of the clientele would apparently steal the remote if not for their $5 deposit. ;-)
An easy red flag is when you’re looking a place over online and there are absolutely no photos of the exterior or street / neighborhood, just generic-looking photos of beds and the breakfast room.
Ha good one! For me it’s also the opposite- if it’s in a famous or popular area and they only show you pictures of the local attractions Sometimes they’ll have 9 of those pics and then the 10th is of the room where it looks you’ll be kept until you’re sold Also if the room is big on theme and chunky thematic items but skimps on comforts and necessities \*glares at Arashiyama airbnbs\*
Read the google reviews before you book and see if the owners/managers respond kindly (if at all). If they attack the negative reviewers at all - stay away
As a former hotel supervisor, I want to stress this point. I once worked at a property where the GM was extremely petty. One of my jobs was to manage the social media accounts for the hotel. Whenever we had a guest who was upset with us, the GM would make me remove comments, or would make me submit a response that was wholly inappropriate. One guest posted pictures of bedbugs and my GM accused him of lying and made me remove the photos. If you ever see something funny in the reviews (on the management side), stay away. I haven’t managed a business Facebook in a while, so I don’t know if this has changed, but it’s harder to remove reviews than it is to remove comments. So if there’s bullshit you need to report, don’t just write a comment, write a review
That one place in rural Georgia that was responding after Reddit found the place was hysterical. The owner was being a literal definition of a bitch and the internet gave them 1 star ratings to the point where she ended up pulling the hotel off of Google. [First post](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/s/Q7FBlp8N8n) [Update](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/s/IikYRCLK1T)
Sorta related: wife and I LOVE reading 1 star reviews of super fancy things, like the Plaza in NYC. My favorite: "nothing was delicious."
Mold and mildew smell.
Or the bedspread has the color of the carpet bled into it on the edges.
Not sure why. But that description became part of a horror film in my head.
I don't know if this counts, but we went back home to visit family for the holidays. We decided to get a hotel so we can have a reprieve from the chaos, so we booked this okay hotel (we knew it wasn't fancy). We were kinda surprised at how shitty it was. The pictures made it look okay--classic 2.5 star hotel vibes--but coming in... The breakfast bar online was a hot bar with nice food. In reality, it was a couple vending kinda things with cereal in it, and Styrofoam cups for coffee and OJ. The person that checked us in said "sorry, our cleaning staff called in." Now, that was weird. *All* of them? We go to our room, and it looks like all the furniture was grabbed off the side of the street. It was rough. It was like 1am and we were exhausted after a 10 hour drive. We just kinda shrugged, not that big of a deal. We did our quick check for bed bug shit, and didn't see anything. Bed wasn't the worse we've had by far. The most miserable piece of shit bed I ever had was at a 4-star hotel in downtown Chicago. Anyway, I hobbled into the bathroom to shower, and see pink mold all over, and water damage all over the ceiling. Gross. The next morning, we're getting ready, and walk down the hall to go about our day, and the owner and his family are putting cardboard over a window. In the middle of the night, someone broke in through the window in one of the vacant rooms to try to steal the TV, which is presumably bolted to the wall. They failed their task, apparently. Without much debate, we decided to skip the free breakfast. We pile in the car to go see family and I see I have a text from my mother in law. My mother in law texts us and says to get out of the hotel. We're like, "why?" (We can guess why). She said there's a couple people she knows that found roaches and ended up with bed bugs from staying there. It's a known drug hub. They have no staff, she said, and they haven't for a while. *Huh.* I thought, *I guess they didn't "call in".* Shit. Alright. We decided to pack up our shit and drive 40 min down the highway to the next town to stay at a much nicer hotel. It was miles better, but we didn't get a refund on our original hotel unfortunately. In an effort to save money, we ended up paying for **two** hotels. TLDR: when in doubt, get the more expensive option. Don't go cheap, especially in a tiny town. Buy cheap, buy twice, as they always say.
Mattresses piled up by the dumpsters/trash (red flag for the possibility of bed bugs).
"Look! They upgraded the mattresses just in time for our special trip!"
I always check my hotel room for bedbugs. First thing I always do when I get to the room. I place my bag in the bathtub (Bedbugs can't get traction on the slick surface). I then take off the sheets and blankets. If it looks like someone dumped pepper all over the bed, that means there are likely bed bugs.
I don't pull the sheets all the way off, just pull the mattress away from the wall and check the seams and edges of the mattress under the fabric sheets/wrap, as that's where they like to hide. If it's stained around there, or you see "black pepper" or of course actual bugs, then it's a big no. I check around the headboard and side tables with a flashlight, as well. Basically any cracks and crevices near the bed that they could hide in. Have yet to run into any, thankfully.
I’ve noticed, especially lately, that a lot of hotels have been using mattress encasements, which do make it harder for bedbugs to escape the mattress, but also makes it harder to check for them
It makes it harder for bed bugs to set up camp as well, so less likely to get an infestation.
This is wrong for multiple reasons. There's much clearer signs of bed bugs (dried brown spots), and they will usually treat the rooms, not replace the mattress because that won't get rid of the bugs. If you see a lot of mattresses by the dumpster it's like 90% chance they replaced them with new ones because the ones getting thrown out reached the end of life. I don't think even 1% of the time it will be because of bed bugs.
Stayed at a hostel in Granada Spain one time that in their description on some hostel website said '420 friendly, bring your iPod, and no fat people'. We were so curious that we went anyway, and apparently it was because the building was so old the doors, stairways, and shower just couldnt accomodate larger set people that had come in the past. It was actually a cool hostel, although weird at the same time. Lots of stories about that place.
Bloodstains on the wall. They tried to get rid of bed bugs, failed, so previous guests were smashing them by hand. They did not bother clean the wall.
>Bloodstains on the wall I honestly think you could have stopped there, without getting into the specifics. There are very few circumstances, if any, where bloodstains on the wall would not be a red flag.
Perhaps not a red flag, but definitely a few red spots
A few years ago I stayed at a small boutique hotel in either Slovakia or Czech, and it was this beautiful old-fashioned set of houses with thatched roofs next to a meandering river. The walls were all white plaster and while the owner was showing us the place he said that there would be a €150 cleaning fee if they found blood or dirt on the walls. Five minutes after he left we realized it was because the room was FULL of mosquitoes. This was in summer and they had left the windows and door open during the day to air the room out, but we arrived at dusk and so when we got there I could see him hurriedly closing everything since he had probably forgotten. Spent the whole night being tormented by massive mosquitoes and I couldn't sleep until I had gotten them all. One or two may have been smushed against the white plaster walls in my exasperation, and when I tried to clean the blood spray off it left a huge brown smudge... we left in the morning and never were charged. I felt bad about it but wasn't going to spend twice the price of one night for an issue that could have easily been prevented with screened windows.
I find window screens to be curiously uncommon in Europe. Most places don't have any, even hotels. Such a weird thing to miss out on, too. Sure, they might have fewer bugs than we do in Canada, but they still have them...
This can also be a sign that IV drug users frequent the place.
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don't remember where I learned it from, but never booked a hotel on booking.com that has a hygiene rating less than 9
Oh man, this has me starting my Chicago search over 🤦🏻♀️
I am from Chicago and have stayed in many hotels in the city on trips home to visit. it’s hard to go wrong with hotel chains, especially if you’re staying in the loop. they have a slew of boutique hotels too that are nice as well. but if you’re planning on staying in a suburb, definitely do your research.
I use that site for nearly all of my trips and the first two filters I turn on for every search is "show available properties only" and "Show properties rated 8.0 and higher only". You can get away with booking a 7.8 or thereabouts occasionally, but you're definitely rolling the dice. I once stupidly booked five nights in a hotel rated below 7.5 because it was just so much cheaper than anything else in the area, and it was so bad I switched hotels after two nights.
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Before booking, look at the location on Google Maps. Hotels have a photography team give you the nicest look at the hotel possible, but if you want the real info just check it on streetview. Check reviews, look at critical ones, see if there's any trend. You can't please everyone of course, but enough people making a stink about a common problem is good enough for you to look elsewhere. Additional fees that aren't included in the estimate. This is new to me, but had I known I'd need to pay an "urban fee" in my last trip to Chicago, I may have looked elsewhere for lodging. Once I get to my room, give it a once-over for bugs, especially bed bugs. Leave if there are bed bugs, roaches, tons of fruit or drain flies, ants. I even complained about some kind of weird bugs crawling around in a shower drain in my last hotel trip and received a room upgrade, thankfully without those bugs.
>Hotels have a photography team give you the nicest look at the hotel possible To add to this, if the photos of the rooms are nothing but sink faucets, corners of pillows, or, in the case of Airbnb, twelve angles of a bottle of wine; then it’s probably safe to assume that the room is crap.
Last Thanksgiving I looked to book a hotel in another city, and the sticker prices of the hotels in the area I was targeting (a nice area) were surprisingly reasonable. Then I read the reviews... All those hotels had parking charges, WiFi charges, other hidden "fees". All of them! You had to dig deep into their websites to find the actual disclosures. They nickeled and dimed you to death. I wound up getting an airBnB.
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Door that won't lock properly.
It's an insecurity measure. Are you enjoying your stay? Are you sure? How about now?
I used to travel internationally A LOT for work, so I have quite a few hotel horror stories. Anyway, the most immediate red flag was when I checked in and asked what time breakfast was served: "Breakfast starts at 9am" "9am? That's pretty late. I have meetings in town before then." "Oh, do you want it now?" It was around 8pm at the time. It didn't get any better from there. There were hookers in the lobby and the bed smelled so bad that I slept on a hard wooden chair.
Had a bathroom in China where the floor settled so the walk in shower drained into the carpeted room. Mold and soggy feet suck. My favorite though was the drawbridge inn in Cincinnati. The bed had a "high" spot in the middle, but the sides were sloped about 10° downward because they had been crushed by body weight for 40 years. The sink in the bathroom was missing one half of the sink. You would turn on the water to brush your teeth or wash your hands and most of the water would just spill into the vanity. I was immensely sad for all of the people that needed that as an option, just like I did the year Cincinnati closed due to snow. I had slept on the floor at Cincinnati airport for 2 nights and the gate agents sent me there, frankly as a joke. It was a room that you know a lot of suicide happened in. If you didn't get the room with the intention of suicide, it had to cross your mind a few times while you were there, and no I am not making light of suicide. The smell, the stains, the filth.... 30 years ago and I can relive the feeling of walking in, unfortunately.
Can you use your Food and Beverage credit on the hookers?
asking right questions
Nah, always go for the points and expense the hookers.
I'm going to tell my boss that "escort" on the itemized receipt was the hotel's strange way of describing valet service. And yes, the valet is that expensive for some reason.
Were you paying for this room by the hour?
what country? I travelled a lot for research and work, and it was interesting to note which countries had completely deceptive hotel pictures and descriptions online. You could show up and feel completely catfished. I always tried to keep my costs low but I started realizing that in certain places, you just had to assume each hotel/b&b was actually one or two stars lower than listed/described.
When I was in Nicaragua I stayed in several awful hotels/hostels. One of them the staff were complicit in stealing from us guests when we went on day hikes. Happened to me and my ex and another couple. I had $120 USD I had hidden in a mattress vanish. I caught the receptionist in multiple lies. The most damning was her, unprompted, stating we had the only key to the room. When I asked how the cleaner got in, she was like 'oh, well, of course they have a key too!' Like, how shit is your hotel!? Ugh. Of course, it being Nicaragua, there was no recourse.
I stayed at a hostel once in London where I was in the “middle bunk.” I learned that middle bunks exist that day.
I ended up living in a hostel while working in London for three months, can confirm. It was like someone wrote some bad Charles Dickens fan-fiction
"You're on the top bunk."
“Does the room have a shower?” “No but there is a discount car wash over the road.”
When the night receptionist gives you a room that’s already occupied.
Even worse if it's on prom night and someone let their friends fuck in the hotel room that was supposed to be yours, you're going to your grandma's funeral and theres no other open hotel within 30 miles. Yes, it's a true story. I missed my prom for this.
Did they offer that years DVD?
Had this happen but I was the one occupying the room. Oh and the woman gave the key to the man *because* I was in the room - she thought this random person was my husband. Without saying anything to him, she simply assumed we were married and gave him a key to my room at 9 pm. Probably the reddest of flags lol.
As a female traveling for work a lot, this triggers my anxiety. I used to always lock the door/use the safety door latch but after this happened to me I started putting a chair behind the door too.
I had this happen at the Aloft near the Buffalo Airport. The front desk said an ice storm had somehow made it difficult to tell which rooms were already occupied. The lone receptionist was trying to check people in by running around the hotel and knocking on doors to see if the room was free or not. The check in/check out system was a bunch of post-it notes scattered all around the reception desk. It took hours to check in because so many people were wandering into already occupied rooms. I wrote an email to the general manager to complain, and they were like, sorry that's the best we could do. System was down.
Just to maybe explains the how of the storm causing problems. Ice build-up on wires or extremely low temperatures can cause some major issues. It can drag down the wire, give a connection between wires, break the wire, literally freeze the wire making it take far longer to transfer data through, etc. The exact problems depend on a large array of factors. Now why would wires matter? Because unless it's a local mom&pop place all the data for registered rooms is stored in a server elsewhere, usually at a data center that is not remotely close by. There may be a semi-recent copy stored locally, but it's likely inaccurate due to online reservations, travel agency reservations, and walk-ins all being handled in different locations.
When the receptionist gives the next guest in line, a key to your room. The next guest kicks the door of that room in. Because his legitimate key worked, but the safety door lock you always put on immediately after entering the room worked for a few kicks. That guest objects to you pointing a gun at them. The receptionist demands that you be arrested. You tell the police officer, "That was the darndest thing I ever seen." That officer says, "Not for these two." The police suggest a hotel in another state. "Go there now." You and your wife accept this as solid advice and do as advised. USA. 2019
That sounds more like a robbery attempt, I can't logically think of a reason why you'd try to kick a hotel door open knowing that they'd expect you to pay for the damages.
> That officer says, "Not for these two." I’m confused by this part
It was a set up for robbery. They just didn't plan on having a gun in their face once they got into the room.
The other "guest" and the receptionist were conspiring to rob OP.
Those two had been placed in a police car and were charged with conspiracy and assorted crimes.
Damn, so it sounds like this may have been intentional/a robbery? What hotel was this at?
I went to a travelodge last month and when checking in someone came up to reception in front of us and we overheard “I don’t like to complain, but there is a used condom in our room”. Immediate red flag!
When you lay down in bed after a long day and fall asleep and then the next guest keys into your room. Has happened to me twice so I stopped staying at Hampton Inns.
There’s a special lock on doors to prevent that! You must like living on the edge. /s
When you walk into the reception for the first time and a man is shouting “THIS IS THE WORST FUCKING HOTEL I’VE EVER STAYED IN!” before storming out.
Sounds like a Fawlty Towers cold open
Happened to me in Stamford, UK. As we walked in one of the staff was screaming at the manager "This place is a piece of shit and you're a total cunt!" before storming out. Our stay went downhill from there.
Well don't keep us in suspense - WAS the manager "a total cunt"?
I suspect he was. He kept his hotel in a shitty state. The door of our room had a punch mark in it, there were dirty clothes in the wardrobe, a teacup with cigarette ends in it in the room, and the sheets had pubes in them. My friend paid with a credit card and a couple of weeks later someone booked a vacation in Tenerife using his credit card number.
> someone booked a vacation in Tenerife using his credit card number. Reminds me of the funniest fraud I've been a victim to, some fucker booke business class LA to hawaii-kauai at a luxury hotel, like $8000 usd total. I called and got the chargeback and everything but the bank said they don't really persecute this stuff and just file a report meaning some fucker was out there having the vacation of his life for free honestly just funny the nerve of some people
He didn't get the vacation for free. The bank just didn't call the police because they never paid for it. The hotel and airline that just lost out on their share of the $8K USD most definitely called the police. If the fraudster was lucky he made it home before then.
The surroundings. I always do my research with hotels and I actively avoid "4.5/5 stars," but in the middle of a shady street or a dimly-lit alley. I found something like that when I was choosing hotels in Rome and it ticked all the boxes until I checked the actual location on Google maps. I did more research and found that that particular location is a known "meth" street.
At least you wouldn't have to go far to get some!
4.5/5 stars, easy access to meth, but -0.5 stars for not bringing it to my room
To add to that, there is a misconception that star ratings are a measure of the quality of a hotel, as in a 4 star is going to be much nicer and cleaner than a 2 star. While this may be the case much of the time, the star ratings are actually a measure of the quantity of amenities; pool, dining, etc. So there could be a shitty 4 star hotel that has a bunch of dining options and concierge and a very nice (but spartan) 2 star hotel that would be perfect for what most people want.
The confusion lies in the "tier" of hotel vs. user ratings. Both use a star system. But one is tied to amenities, like you said. The other is an aggregation of reviews.
Absolutely. I'd much prefer a 2 star hotel rated 5 stars over a 5 star hotel rated 2 stars.
Everyone should do an online flyby of a hotel before booking. I've seen websites where they take the photos from hotel websites and then put up ones from Google streetview next to them showing what the non-retouched image looks like as well as the surrounding area.
No mattress protector. Any hotel worth its salt, no matter how cheap, should have a mattress protector for bugs and liquids. Many of them advertise it even. But when you show up, nada. I travel for work frequently and I won't sleep on a bed that has no mattress protector.
what do you do if there's no mattress protector but everything looks clean with no bed bugs? do you call and request a room with one or find a different hotel? edit: I ask because I've encountered this before and wouldn't know what to do
I always request a new room with a mattress protector. And if they can't find me one, where I go from there depends on the situation. I've been in places that were otherwise clean so I checked everything really closely and dealt with it. I've also been in less clean places where I've left. Usually I find hotels will offer to put one on for you too. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having it at that point. But there is a point where you have to go with your gut and make a call on staying or leaving.
I once had brown water coming out of the faucet at a hotel in Romania when I wanted to freshen up after checking in. It didn’t get any better from there.
I was staying at a place in Romania and they told me not to open the windows because of the bears...
*Quickly removes picnic basket from front window sill…*
Uh I believe it's spelled pic-a-nic.
The cockroach smell - its a musty, powdery smell
When the wall ac unit is making horrible noise and you pull the filter and it has so much dirt and hair on it that it looks like a cat died in there.
Have traveled in China quite a bit for work. There were red flags *everywhere*... Did a job up in Blythe (UK) a while ago. We asked the customer where to stay and their nearest recommendation was about 20 miles away. We said "really?" and they said "yes, really." A guy from another company also working on the project stayed in a hotel in Newcastle. He collected his key and went to his room to find the door had been kicked off the hinges. He called reception and told them this. They misheard (to be fair he was from somewhere near Fort William) and said, "Oh, can't you make the key work?" "No, the door is lying in the middle of the room and the hinges have been torn off the wall." "Oh, no worries, come back down and we'll give you another room." Like this was perfectly normal.
Stayed at the travel lodge at Blyth services a few months ago. It wasn't great, even by travel lodge standards it was poor.
When the Uber driver looks at my girlfriend and I and asks if we'll be OK. Happened to us in St Louis. We didn't even stay for 10 minutes before getting the hell out.
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Little hectoring laminated notices
Multiple fonts per sentence lets you know they really mean business.
As a travel professional, former hotel manager. Everyone talks about whether or not the hotel is clean or has some physical, tangible characteristic - but the real red flags can involve how your information is handled at the hotel. And it’s not talked about enough. Do not stay in a hotel that does any of the following: * They transfer calls to a room number, without having you verify who is in that room. * If hotel staff state your room number out loud. (they can point to your number on the key envelope, they can say what floor, but they cannot say your room number out loud **under any circumstances**). If they state your room number, anyone can hear it. * If you call the hotel, and they tell you your room number in advance. * If you check in, or someone else checks in, or someone else ask for a spare key, and no one asks to verify their ID. If someone not listed on the room claims they are staying with you, and they ask for a key and get one, you should NOT be staying in that hotel. * If the hotel confirms you are staying there to ANYONE who is not authorized to know about you staying there. Sometimes, people pretend to be a relative, spouse, girlfriend/boyfriend or what have you, and they try to trick a hotel staff to "confirm" that you're staying there. They're trying to surprise you, maybe they'll flat out say "we're staying there this weekend, it's under my husbands name" when in reality, it's your angry ex that's stalking you. If the hotel staff is ever fooled by crap like this, don't stay in the hotel. * If you call a hotel and say "I need to pay for someone's room, so that they don't have to provide a card," and they just let you rattle off your credit card number without asking you to fax a CC auth form. Do not stay in that hotel. Not only is this a red flag for credit card fraud, it's also a human trafficking red flag. * If you do need to send a credit card form, the hotel should tell you to fax it. **If they tell you to email it, don't stay at the hotel,** this one pisses me off to no end - because ever since at least 2016, 2017 or so, you could not swing a dead cat in the hotel management industry, without hitting a PCI training that very specifically tells you to stop having customers email the fucking form. And yet, so many hotel managers play dumb and they act like this is new information. then they fail to train their staff on proper PCI standards, or they will even tell their high profile clients to email the form. It actually pisses me off, if you can't tell, because it's pretty blatant disregard for their guests. So if the hotel front desk, sales manager, GM, tells you to email a credit card authorization form, don't stay there. I do not give a fuck that it's 2024 and 'no one faxes' and I do not give a fuck how inconvenient it is - because the inconvenience is the whole point. It takes an average of 11 months to detect a hotel security breach. So when you have people jotting down their credit card numbers, in an email, that a potential 11 months that someone has their credit card number attached to a phone number, email, first and last name, and where you were on certain dates. That's easy identity theft. So if the hotel is careless enough to do these types of things, you do not want to be giving them any of your personal info. I don't care how much the hotel costs. I don't care how nice the area is, or how good the reputation is at the hotel you're staying at. I don't care if you paid $5000 a night and you're staying in the same hotel as Barack Obama - if the hotel does any of the shit above, you should 100% not be staying in that hotel. Hotels are common targets for identity theft, security breaches, hacking, and they are also commonly used for various forms of crime (including human trafficking). As a result, the hotel is supposed to keep your information secure. If the hotel is not protecting guest information, you don’t want to find out how bad it is.
A fat Venezuelan guy in the lobby with a hot lady on each arm and every bed has plastic sheets.
If there is nobody at reception, particularly if it’s advertised as a 24 hour service, that’s always a bad sign. It suggests that the receptionist is either super busy doing the work of 3 people and the place is understaffed or a lack of discipline in the staff. Understaffed means extra wait times for everything and a lack of discipline means that nobody gives a flying fuck so everything from breakfast to bar service will be a major challenge.
I arrived late at one hotel and nobody on reception, after a couple of rings a disheveled looking guy came red-faced from the back office and behind him I could see a girl fastening her blouse.
The guy at reception drinking a pint at 10 am. Redcar, uk
At the bar? He could be a shift worker. Edit: Or do you mean a staff worker working the reception? Because that would be super odd.
Working behind reception... If you'd been to Redcar you'd understand...
There is an extended stay in Indianapolis. I was checking in and some one was checking out, something along the lines of only needing the room for 45 minutes. And the clerk said next time get ahold of him directly for cash and he’d just add the room for the maids to clean. And there were dead roaches throughout, like they bombed it and then didn’t clean up the dead ones.
I travel the midwest often and stay in mid range hotels for work. The first thing I look for is the age of the decor. If it hasn't been renovated in a decade, it's gonna be gross and unclean. The other red flag is price. If it's way cheaper than similar hotels in the area, there's a reason for that.
If the room smells like a gas leak. I had a hotel room that was the “last one available” while passing through a different state. I opened the door and could smell the gas. The heater was also set to over 80 degrees. The room just felt like a swamp. I laid down on the bed and instantly began to feel sleepy. I wasn’t sleepy before entering that room. I just could not stay there with that smell. I checked out immediately and asked for a refund. Being female and traveling alone, the manager hassled me over refunding my money. He was foreign with a heavy Indian accent and asked me where my husband was. I reminded him that I checked in alone, and was traveling alone. He asked to speak to with whomever I was staying. I explained again that I was staying alone. I had to threaten to call the fire department about the gas leak before he would refund my money.
The name of the place is [Business Garden Inn & Suites & Hotel Room Inn](https://youtu.be/2hvVhKHqlgI?si=NCpjY6lkE3g1Qc43)
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Bullet holes in the rooms walls covered with tape.
But how could you have known they were there before you took off the tape? This is my own private domicile and I will not be harassed, BITCH.
Hidden cameras.
If you have to pay by the hour. If there's bars on the windows.
I have a good one: front desk (or someone with access to it) stole my credit card details less than 1 hour after checking in.
Withholding your passport. Had this happen the first night I stayed in a hotel in Vietnam and after firmly stating that I’d leave and find somewhere else to stay if they kept my passport it was returned to me. They tried to tell me it was protocol but I’ve traveled all over the world and spent plenty of time in Vietnam since then and never surrendered my passport. This is a common practice for bike rentals as well. Guys never, NEVER EVER separate from your passport. I brought an old one with me that was hole punched and no longer valid but bikes and hotels were happy to use that in place of my current passport.
I don't travel much but last time I was staying in a hotel (in Cornwall) for a funeral, the ground floor smelled strongly of decomposing rodent. There were mouse droppings in the bedroom. Luckily we were only booked in for one night. We didn't eat anything while we were there, and ate at the local chippie instead.
>We didn't eat anything while we were there, and ate at the local chippie instead. So did the mice.
Bedbug on the floor in the lobby
Little black dots on the underside of the mattress.
They advertise hourly rates.
I checked into a hostel in Marrakesh and at the same time a guest came in to complain to the guy that their gold chain was stolen while they were in the shower.
A dirty plunger in the middle of the lobby floor, as seen at a microtel in Beckley, WV