Foo - OK, let's hear your nastiest, hotel horror stories

I'm staying in the heart of the oil industry in Southern Saskatchewan for a week. There also happens to be a farming convention on at the same time. This perfect storm means that I'm stuck in the only available room in town.

My first impression was walking into the lobby, and I use the term loosely, being hit with the wafting smell of old cigarettes and beer. The second sensation was the soothing sounds coming from the VLT room. Come to think of it, the initial smells did include the slightly desparate stench of gambler sweat. So the front desk girl walked me to my room, past the off-sale room where a lady, and I use the term loosely, yelled out to her friend that she wants to "get stinkin' drunk" ... and she was the person working at the off-sale counter :eek: The good news is that I didn't have to go too far, seeing that my room was directly adjacent to the bar. Now for the really disgusting part ... I opened up the door to my room :twitchy: The overwhelming stench hit me like a Mack truck. I know I'm sounding dramatic, but trust me ... it was bad! Really, really bad!!! The smell was a mix of smoke, booze, sweat, definitely musty, and with a hint of urine thrown in for good measure. Did I mention it was bad? OK, I managed to push past the smell, well not really, I'm sitting here typing trying hard not to breath in too deeply, and had my first good look around. I was mostly looking for bugs, but so far have only found a spider in the bathtub. I haven't lifted the lid to the toilet yet ... to scared, but I did find smears (of unknown origin) on the bathroom wall. The decor, and I use the term loosely, is an eclectic mix of furniture from the last 5 decades, topped off with a massive old TV. I won't be watching it though since I'm too scared to pick up the remote ... not kidding. It's got stickies (of unkown origin) all over the buttons. OMG ... as I'm sitting here I just looked up at the ceiling. It's the old 70's popcorn type ceiling. Well now I know where the spider came from. It's covered with webs. Seriously, how do they pass any kind of industry inspections ... or is there even such a thing for hotels??? There's also a smoke detector on the ceiling, but you know how old plastic yellows with age ... well this one must be at least 20 years old. I don't have much faith that it's in working order, let alone still connected to an electric supply. I mentioned that I was sitting here typing ... I'm actually lying down on one of the two beds. #1 is unusable as a bed since the matress seems to have lost all it's springs in the middle portion. #2 seems to have some springs left, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to wake up with a back ache. I'm too scared to pull back the covers right now. I figure I'll deal with it once I absolutely have to fall asleep. Folks, I'm really freaked out here. Seriously! If there's any bright spots with my room, I'd have to say it's that I'm bumped up against the bar ... and it's particularly roudy tonight ... well truthfully I have nothing to compare it to, so it might actually be a quiet night. Either way, it will help keep me awake, delaying the inevitable point at which I'm going to have to crawl under the covers.

Please ... PLEASE share your own stories :twitchy:

I slept on a couch. I got MRSA.

Couch

Oh, and POKE!

Couch

Oh, and POKE!

Couch

Yeah, I guess I did say once a day. But no begging for more.

Once I stayed in the USC dorms for a convention. The sheets were bloody.

Once I stayed in the USC dorms for a convention. The sheets were bloody.

Define 'stayed'. As in you saw the sheets were bloody, and you still 'stayed'???

It might be psychosomatic, but I can't stop scratching all over :cry:

Define 'stayed'. As in you saw the sheets were bloody, and you still 'stayed'???

I had the sheets changed, but I didn't have much choice in moving, things were pretty booked.

A buddy of mine booked himself a vacay to the Bahamas that included an overnight stay prior to the trip itself at some hotel at DFW airport. I think it was the Hyatt and the only way to get to it was the toll road. As I was the one dropping him off, and neither of us having been to the Big D before, we decided to head down a day early and take in the sights. Figured we'd just wing it.

Turns out what my wife (who I hadn't even met yet at the time) is right- 'traffic' in Tulsa is nothing compared to other parts of the country. We ended up on what IIRC was the Stennis at about 5 p.m... six lanes of vehicles pointed in the same direction and not moving? Seriously, WTF??

We hit the first motel we found at the first exit we could get to. Broken glass in the parking lot, a couple of windows boarded up, dogs roaming the hallway... we damned near ended up sleeping in my 1995 Mazda Protege.

And I refuse to sleep under the covers.

gf stayed in a hospital with once and got a staph infection the size of a small tangerine, had to be taken to the er.

was in the elevator in a casino in reno, and a working lady of advancing age got on with me still counting her money. she was wearing a bright jump suit, pulled paper towel out of her bag and reached into the front of her pants and swabbed her self clean on the elevator with me, and threw the paper towel back into her bag. while talking the entire time. at some point asked me if i wanted service.

Told her I was good for the night.

and

256964

(crosses Saskatchewan and Reno off of list of places to go)

Another Reno story, a convention for the blind was in progress. This explains why on the flight from DFW to Reno there were 3 or 4 guide dogs on the jet. Anyway, get to the hotel and the place is filled with blind folks and a lot had dogs. Not sure how you tell when the dog needs to go outside to use the bathroom but a lot didn't make it. So, there was lots of puddles throughout the lobby, near the doors, etc.

Worst story I've heard: Some beds in hotels are set on box frames thus hollow underneath. A flight attendant, noting an unpleasant smell in her room, began to search for the source and discovered a body under the box springs the next morning.

Don't touch anything (http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/06/17/fecal-matter-hiding-in-hotel-rooms/).

This one time, I stayed in a hotel that didn't have a hot tub or work out room, it was freaking horrible experience.

Hotels are nasty places. You'll always sleep in somebody else's stains. Sometimes the stains blend with the fabric and you don't see them, but they are there.

On the other side of the scale is the hotel-paranoia. When your traveling partner has hotel paranoia you can't travel on a small Hyundai... you need a huge SUV to carry all the extra sheets/conforter/lysol wipes/clorox/ect. Checking in is a 2 hours endevour, cleaning everything, disinfecting, even mopping up the place. You are better buying a trailer like this:

http://i1.rvusa.com/wm/showimagerv.ashx?id=7348706&width=100&height=75&quality=60&crop=auto&t=5

I had a horrible experience at the Holiday inn in TN somewhere. They were out of croissants and I had to have a bagel for breakfast instead.

I had a horrible experience at the Holiday inn in TN somewhere. They were out of croissants and I had to have a bagel for breakfast instead.

I would've demanded a full refund. That is completely inexcusable.

I'd rather sleep in a hotel than a hospital.

So other than the accommodations sucking, how is the rest of Saskatoon treating you.

... are you in a certain city in Saskatchewan that rhymes with a part of the female anatomy?

... are you in a certain city in Saskatchewan that rhymes with a part of the female anatomy?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vq5-dRYp-c

I recently stayed at place that was way worse than your Alfster. The valet parking attendant was sick and I had to park my own car. Luckily my aged mother was with me, so I did not have to carry my bags to my room.

One time my brother and I checked into a motel in Athens Ohio. His wife and some friends had left for camping the night before and we had to work, so we drove down after we got out of work. Turns out we could not find them (Long before cell phone days). So when it got dark, we decided to get a room in Athens and go drinking downtown. We checked into the room and it had a nasty assed stale smell. I went to bath room to take a whiz and saw the bathroom had carpeted floors. I didn't think anything about that at the time. There was a white paper bathmat in front of the toilet. I stood there on the mat, did what I came to do and moved over to wash my hands, looked over and HOLY CRAP! The paper bath mat had two big wet, YELLOW, foot prints. The carpet was soaked with pee.

Today, I would have gone to the front office and raised hell and demanded a refund, (The made us pay up front.) but back then we didn't think of that. In order to take a shower, I wore my shoes INTO the tub, I took them off and set them on the toilet lid, showered, dried my feet, put the shoes back on and walked out. I was careful not to touch my soles for a awhile.

Later we found the campers and had a good time. They enjoyed laughing at our experience.

It did not kill me. It make me stronger.

Room had plastic sheets, realized we were in a room next to a hooker who liked to sing "Oh mah darling clemintine" in the shower after she did her job (she had two guys the one time) - and her pimp would pull up occasionally in a Beamer with a very noticeable exhaust - we figured he was collecting the money, found a used syringe the next morning over the door frame in the bathroom ... stayed and endured (put a chair up to the door too) - dinky town and didn't know were to go.

One time my ex and I were forced to stay at this hotel in Switzerland called Le Mirador. For crying out loud, the swimming pool was both indoors and outdoors so you could enter the water indoors where it was warm and swim over to the other end outside and there was snow all around the pool. The restaurant was almost absurd. There were two or three waiters for our table. One to take the food off the cooking tray and put it on the serving tray and another to take it off the serving tray and put it on our plates. We never got out of there for less than $150 and that was without drinks.

The place was remote. The picture here shows you how far out of it it was. This is pretty much what the view was like from the porch of our room, with the Danube River valley in the distance.

http://images.cdn.gadmin.ch/84640/images/Mirador_gross.jpg

There were just two ways into town. Take the funicular which was $8.00 apiece each way or take a taxi which ran about $40.00 each way. The big things to do in town were a farmer's market and feeding the geese by the lake. Wah! Wah! Wah! World class resorts are so terrible!

There was hiking all around and the first snowfall of the year happened the night we arrived. I figured out that the funicular was part of the Swiss National Train service so we were able to use our Eurail passes and get on free. They seemed very disappointed when I discovered this trick. Our Eurail passes also took us up a cog railway to a ski resort called Les Pléiades, the ground had just been covered with snow, but the slopes had not been opened, so we had the place almost to ourselves. Apparently you can ride your bike back down if the route is clear of snow. We also took day trips to Bern and Lausanne.

The worst part was that all of this except the Eurailpass was free. My ex had won the trip in a raffle done by a TV station. Airfare was included, but we noted that the plane stopped at Gatwick on the way in, so we asked them if we could get off there instead. We then took a two week trip from London to Amsterdam to Berlin (the Berlin Wall had fallen the month before) and finally to Lake Geneva. And there were excruciating parts.

The trains were so closely timed that we got on one in Lille that we thought would go to Amsterdam, but we were a few minutes early and caught the train to Boulogne instead. To top it off, as we were realizing what had happened and panicking about what to do, my backpack slid out of the luggage rack and hit my ex on the head. As a husband, you don't get much lower than getting your wife on the wrong train to god knows where and then hitting her accidently with a 30-40lb backpack. At least that got a gentleman to take pity on us, and it turned out he had the schedules for the entire french train system, and got us put off at some little village and told the station master to make sure we got on the train that was due in the other direction in 20 minutes. Limping back to Lille, we had dinner in a little Creperie/Bar that was choking thick with cigarette smoke, and everyone else seemed to know everyone else.

We missed our reservations in Amsterdam and got a room in a hostel. The room was tiny and had tile floors and slick walls and echoed every sound from the corridor. We got a better place the next few nights, but the room was so small that you practically had to walk on top of the bed to get from one side of the room to the other. And the shower was a communal one down the hall. But they assured us that all the other rooms on that floor had their own private showers.

Since it was so soon after the fall of the Berlin wall, all the train cars were still East German, sparse and rough and so crowded that we didn't sit down between Hamburg and Berlin. We arrived in Berlin late at night and took what we could get. The room was enormous, probably 800 square feet. It looked like a 19th century ballroom with ceilings that were probably 20 feet tall and had obviously survived World War II intact. But the shower was just put up next to one wall as was the sink and the bed in another corner. Most of the room was quite empty.

The worst part was the flight home. From Gatwick to San Diego, we sat next to a guy who was a chain smoker and chain drinker. It was hard to breathe and he was an obnoxious drunk.

I'd tell you about all the great parts of the trip, but that wouldn't be apropos.

Stayed in a hotel in Kigali, Rwanda once that had inch thick steel plates mounted on the outside facing inner walls to prevent bullets from military grade weapons penetrating back in the 90's.

So other than the accommodations sucking, how is the rest of Saskatoon treating you.

S'toon??? I wish! That's where I was born and raised. Best city in Canada ... nay, North America. Keeping that in perspective, I've only been to about a dozen US cities.


... are you in a certain city in Saskatchewan that rhymes with a part of the female anatomy?

Dolores? Oh you mean the other one. Well that's where I stayed on Sunday night ... at the Hotel Saskatchewan ... very nice. But then foolishly travelled to hicksville, SK ... or at least that should be the name ... big mistake!!!

I recently stayed at place that was way worse than your Alfster. The valet parking attendant was sick and I had to park my own car. Luckily my aged mother was with me, so I did not have to carry my bags to my room.

How kind of you ... to present an opportunity for your aged mother to get in a bit of exercise.

Stayed in a Lexington, KY Days Inn (or was it England (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLDVIViWW74)?) where one of the cross beams had gone out askew on the treadle.

... The carpet was soaked with pee ...

Congratulations, your experience was worse than mine. I actually had an involuntary, gagging reflex reading through your post.

One time my ex and I were forced to stay at this hotel in Switzerland called Le Mirador. For crying out loud, the swimming pool was both indoors and outdoors so you could enter the water indoors where it was warm and swim over to the other end outside and there was snow all around the pool. The restaurant was almost absurd. There were two or three waiters for our table. One to take the food off the cooking tray and put it on the serving tray and another to take it off the serving tray and put it on our plates. We never got out of there for less than $150 and that was without drinks.

The place was remote. The picture here shows you how far out of it it was. This is pretty much what the view was like from the porch of our room, with the Danube River valley in the distance.

http://images.cdn.gadmin.ch/84640/images/Mirador_gross.jpg

There were just two ways into town. Take the funicular which was $8.00 apiece each way or take a taxi which ran about $40.00 each way. The big things to do in town were a farmer's market and feeding the geese by the lake. Wah! Wah! Wah! World class resorts are so terrible!

There was hiking all around and the first snowfall of the year happened the night we arrived. I figured out that the funicular was part of the Swiss National Train service so we were able to use our Eurail passes and get on free. They seemed very disappointed when I discovered this trick. Our Eurail passes also took us up a cog railway to a ski resort called Les Pléiades, the ground had just been covered with snow, but the slopes had not been opened, so we had the place almost to ourselves. Apparently you can ride your bike back down if the route is clear of snow. We also took day trips to Bern and Lausanne.

The worst part was that all of this except the Eurailpass was free. My ex had won the trip in a raffle done by a TV station. Airfare was included, but we noted that the plane stopped at Gatwick on the way in, so we asked them if we could get off there instead. We then took a two week trip from London to Amsterdam to Berlin (the Berlin Wall had fallen the month before) and finally to Lake Geneva. And there were excruciating parts.

The trains were so closely timed that we got on one in Lille that we thought would go to Amsterdam, but we were a few minutes early and caught the train to Boulogne instead. To top it off, as we were realizing what had happened and panicking about what to do, my backpack slid out of the luggage rack and hit my ex on the head. As a husband, you don't get much lower than getting your wife on the wrong train to god knows where and then hitting her accidently with a 30-40lb backpack. At least that got a gentleman to take pity on us, and it turned out he had the schedules for the entire french train system, and got us put off at some little village and told the station master to make sure we got on the train that was due in the other direction in 20 minutes. Limping back to Lille, we had dinner in a little Creperie/Bar that was chocking thick with cigarette smoke, and everyone else seemed to know everyone else.

We missed our reservations in Amsterdam and got a room in a hostel. The room was tiny and had tile floors and slick walls and echoed every sound from the corridor. We got a better place the next few nights, but the room was so small that you practically had to walk on top of the bed to get from one side of the room to the other. And the shower was a communal one down the hall. But they assured us that all the other rooms on that floor had their own private showers.

Since it was so soon after the fall of the Berlin wall, all the train cars were still East German, sparse and rough. We arrived in Berlin late at night and took what we could get. The room was enormous, probably 800 square feet. It looked like a 19th century ballroom with ceilings that were probably 20 feet tall and had obviously survived World War II intact. But the shower was just put up next to one wall as was the sink and the bed in another corner. Most of the room was quite empty.

The worst part was the flight home. From Gatwick to San Diego, we sat next to a guy who was a chain smoker and chain drinker. It was hard to breathe and he was an obnoxious drunk.

I'd tell you about all the great parts of the trip, but that wouldn't be apropos.

Actually your trip sounded pretty good ... compared to a pee soaked bathroom carpet. Gorgeous pic btw.

Stayed in a hotel in Kigali, Rwanda once that had inch thick steel plates mounted on the outside facing inner walls to prevent bullets from military grade weapons penetrating back in the 90's.

Oh come on, I mean really ... who hasn't done that :p Kidding, that's pretty intense. Did it get a chance to stop any bullets while you were there?

OK, I've got to provide an update to my hotel horror story. I phoned my head office and told them I'm not staying there another night, and to find something ... anything ... different. I'm staying in a NEW, Gorgeous hotel. I see actual sleep in my future :)

Probably our worst night in a hotel ever was at the Best Western in Seaside, CA. We were there with the baby (~6mo or so, just crawling) and in the next room were some college kids who didn't stop partying loudly until the police showed up after 3am (and probably a ton of calls to the front desk), and after Mrs. A went next door to talk to them (she knows I go straight to jackass mode in these situations and prefers to be nice about it). Of course, the baby didn't sleep in an unfamiliar place so well, even after the noise stopped. We were all cranky the next day.

Worst trip period... Yosemite, Memorial Day 2008. We were all ready to go backpack for a couple of nights from Glacier Point, but there was a freak snowstorm at the higher elevations. We departed the Bay Area early to try and get a wilderness permit to anywhere available, and missed our chance. Ended up spending a wet night at the Backpacking Holding Cell Camp (or whatever it's called) in the Valley with everyone else who showed up for a permit after 9:02am. Glacier Point was open the next day, but only accessible from the Valley. So we re-parked at Inspiration Point and started up. After a few wet hours of hiking and noting the decreasing temperature, we realized that this wasn't going to happen with the rules on being so far from the Valley and so far from the road, etc.. So we hiked back to the car and took off for home a day early. Ended up getting t-boned in Merced by a teenager in a Saturn with bald tires in the rain. Drove what was left of our Civic home, and the insurance company wrote the car off the next morning.

Just 1?

1. When in college, band went to an away game and the hotel was overbooked...so to accomodate the group, they activated a couple of closets with beds. Of course, with my luck I got one of them.

2. In Dublin, the room was right over the dumpster. At 3AM, some dude disposed of all the glass bottles from the bar by breaking them, one at a time, in the dumpster.

3. More funny, but my wife would have killed him. Outside Savannah, stopped at a motel along the interstate to see if they had vacancy. They did, and he volunteered that the senior discount rate was $____. I was 45 at the time, and didn't correct him as I accepted the discount.

Oh come on, I mean really ... who hasn't done that :p Kidding, that's pretty intense. Did it get a chance to stop any bullets while you were there?

No, and actually, it was oddly reassuring! :p

One school I went to was in a converted hotel. The classrooms were kind of small, but every one had a bathroom. So, imagine a hotel, where you have an algebra exam in one room, a history test in another, an english paper due in a third and they punish you for sleeping. Can it get worse than that?

And the restaurant, turned cafeteria? It had the worst institutional food I ever tasted. Black beans and rice was their specialty. The cobbler was so congealed that you could turn it upside down and it wouldn't fall out of the bowl.

Hard to pick which hotel horror story is worse, but my top two:

1. In Dayton, OH a couple days before my wedding. I arrived back to my room at about midnight to discover a huge party going on in the room upstairs. I was so tired I managed to fall asleep even with the cacophony. About three in the morning I am awakened to the sound of my bathroom ceiling collapsing and a torrent of water pouring into my room. Apparently the partiers somehow managed to overflow their bathtub and flood their bathroom to the point where the floor would no longer support the weight of the water. I got up, dressed, gathered my belongings and checked out. The next day I came back and spoke with the manager to receive a complete refund.

2. 9/11/2001 - We were traveling when we heard news of the tragedy. We arrived at our hotel in Fort Smith, AR that evening and encountered the following: a woman in the lobby who had tourette's syndrome, but only spoke Bengali so we couldn't understand what she was screaming. Discovering our room had been broken into and having the TV stolen prior to our arrival. Roaches in the bathroom. The hotel having lost every regular key to our room resulting in us having to go to the front desk so that an employee could open the door with the master key. A door that wouldn't shut unless you slammed it with all your strength. A guy in a neighboring room who came out with a gun drawn when he heard the aforementioned slamming. That same guy dealing drugs resulting in cars pulling up, idling for 5 minutes and then driving away throughout the night. We would have gone to a different hotel but every room in town was taken due to stranded travelers whose flights had been grounded.

When going on Scuba diving trips I've been exposed to many crappy hotels. I've had some rooms with 12"+ holes in the roof, some with roaches (they scatter when you turn on the light), and one with mice in the bed (it squeaked when you sat down). However, my favorite was in Virginia Beach when my Dad and I were travelling together. For some reason, every hotel room in town was booked... except for certain rooms that catered to navy guys & their lady friends @ an hourly rate. Having stopped at 4 other hotels, we were desperate so we selected the African Safari suite (ceiling mirror and beaded curtains included) which rented out @ a nightly rate. However, the A/C was broken so my Dad called the front desk. They sent someone up to take a look at the problem and they seemed surprised to see a 15yr old boy in the room with a 40yr old man. The first person couldn't fix the issue so they called a repairman. The repairman didn't have a part so he called another truck to bring the part by and that person got to check out the room. At this point it was 3am and we had to be @ the boat at 6am. The only thing making the situation bearable were the looks on each new person's face as they took in the scene.