Do you remember the first time you ever stayed overnight at a hotel? It was a magical ride up the elevator to open the door. You could go to the pool, look out on the street, and sleep in a much bigger bed than the one at home. Unfortunately, not all hotel stays are made equal. These stories about horrific hotels make us want to leave, and never look back.
1. Outside the Terms of Your Rental Agreement (and Morality)
I worked for a downtown metropolitan hotel for a long time, and I’ve seen a lot I wasn’t supposed to see. Probably the worst was a kid with an old man. I checked this guy in at like one in the morning (not uncommon, because people travel at different times), but he was alone. Like an hour later he asked for something like a towel or blanket.
Anyway, I dispatched our runner to deliver it. Afterward, the runner comes to me and says he thinks something is wrong because he caught a glimpse of someone, and the old guy was trying hard to block the entrance. Since we were supposed to take stuff like human trafficking seriously, I asked our maintenance to cut his power so we would get a call to come up to try and fix the problem.
He does, and I go up with him to apologize for the inconvenience because the guy was also a top tier member. Sure enough, we hear a kid in the bathroom hiding. I tried to ask who the kid was, and the old guy tried everything to shut us down from throwing his status around to bribing. So I called the cops and let them deal with it. They hauled him off in cuffs.
2. What’s That Behind Curtain #1?
My dad went to a hotel once and checked in for a first-floor room. He went in the room, put his stuff down, opened the curtains and…a man was behind them. My dad said, “excuse me,” closed the curtains, got his stuff, and left. He went to the front desk to explain that a man was hiding in his room. We found out later that the guy had somehow got into the room through an open window.
3. Trapped on the Toilet
The bathroom locked from the outside. If you accidentally shut the door all the way, you had to have someone in the room open the door for you when you were done. If you were by yourself, you were out of luck until someone came back, or you called the front desk from the bathroom to send someone up. This was pre-mainstream cell phone usage, so you may not have had your phone on you at all times. We got our stay comped.
4. Surprise Every Time
Motel 7 in El Paso had a software problem and lost track of occupied rooms. Rather than checking, they issued keys to possibly occupied rooms and waited to see if anyone complained!
I opened my new hotel room door to find other guests in there. Went back down, got the keys to another room and opened the door. I couldn’t believe it.
It had happened again. I walked in on a whole family. Good lord.
5. Worst Kind to Ever Find
I was staying at a Travel Lodge for a few nights a few years back. After I got ready, I went to get into bed, and I saw that there was a blood stain on the sheet right in the middle of the bed. And then I pulled the sheet back, and made a horrifying discovery. There was a HUGE puddle of blood on the mattress. It was still wet! Not nice!
6. Complimentary Cooler
The air conditioner was SPITTING OUT ICE onto me while I was sleeping. I woke up thinking I wet myself but then realized half the bed was soaked. Other than that, it was fine.
7. Doing Backflips to Get Outta There
I needed to find a hotel because of my daughter’s gymnastics competition. I read reviews online, and apparently, the Travel Lodge there had good reviews. The price was pretty good too, so I booked it. I had difficulty finding it because it was dark, and their sign wasn’t lit. The parking lot was pitch black.
And just outside the entrance, there were two iffy looking guys who seemed like they were negotiating something. When we got inside the motel, we saw that the lobby was dimly lit with flickering lights. The room was no better. There were stained sheets, holes in the bedspread, and to top it all, hair in the shower.
The fitness room consisted of one stair stepper that was broken and a TV on the ground that didn’t even work. I told the front desk that I wanted to cancel our reservation. She said to me, “I don’t blame you. This place is gross. I had an I interview at Kohl’s and hope they hire me, so I can quit this place.”
8. Location, Location, Location
The first time I went to El Paso to do business south of the border, I stayed at the best American chain in Juarez. On my first night there, I was having dinner in the restaurant when suddenly, there were a bunch of cars in the parking lot and a lot of banging outside. I hit the deck as one does. My waiter sauntered over, looked down at me, and said, “no worries, this happens here all the time.” After that, I stayed in El Paso. I felt very safe.
9. Classified Information
I checked into a casino hotel. We put our stuff in the room and then went to the casino. When we came back hours later, we could not get into our room. I traipsed to the front desk to make an inquiry as to why the card key was not working. I was informed that our room had to be exterminated due to "an infestation.”
When I inquired about the type of infestation, I was told that the desk clerk was not allowed to divulge that information. The hotel manager came, and he led us back to our room. He let us in, and the place was tossed. There was furniture overturned, and the mattress was not on the bed. It was just a mess in there.
Our luggage and belongings were pretty much where we had left them. The manager than took us to our new room and then gave us the key cards for it. I asked him how someone could check someone into a room only to discover that it was infested with whatever. Again, he was unable to adequately answer my question.
I asked him about the type of extermination chemicals that they used because our stuff had been exterminated as well. He, again, could not comment. We wound up throwing out any consumables, didn't wear anything from our luggage, and checked out early the next morning never to return again to that hotel. When we got home, we washed everything in the hottest water available.
10. Something’s Feels Off
I was in a big brand hotel at one of their nicer locations. I got my hotel key card and went to my room. When I opened the door, the bed wasn’t made...I just figured whatever, they forgot to clean this one. I’d just give the front desk a call. I walked past the bathroom and saw someone’s toiletries were sitting by the sink.
Then when I realized there were two suitcases on the other side of the bed as well... and people’s stuff was everywhere. That’s when I confirmed that they messed up with the rooms and made my way back downstairs to get a different room. They gave me a free upgrade and half off what I originally was going to pay for my stay.
11. Warm State
There was this Airbnb I stayed in a few weeks ago. It was just a room in the bottom of someone's house that had three other secluded rooms. It was pretty rough even by my standards, but it was late, so I just decided to settle in. And then, when I was finally able to lie down, I saw that the duvet was covered in dry blood.
I decided to sleep with just a bedsheet, and I had the heater on high. But then it got worse. I woke up in the middle of the night to hear a faint/trancelike voice speaking another language nonstop for 30 minutes and probably longer after I fell asleep. I made sure that the first thing that I did the next morning was nope out of there.
12. Going Through a Lot
This happened over Christmas time in China. I came back to the hotel after dropping my boyfriend off at the airport, so I was clearly not in the best mood, only to find a lot of my belongings had moved around the room, and there were items missing...including my passport. There was even food left in the bathroom.
I found my deodorant in the shower, and my shower gel was on the TV cabinet. Things were taken out of my suitcase, while other items were put into my suitcase. The jewellery was on the floor. It was just really random stuff that had been moved around. I had to go to reception and try my best to speak Mandarin.
After I explained the situation, I found out that the cleaner had taken my passport with the sheets to the laundry room, which is crazy as it was actually in a cupboard because there was no safe available. My passport was the main issue, but I managed to get it back, but I had gifts from my mom that were thrown out.
I checked out of that hotel two weeks earlier than I was supposed to, and I was able to receive a full refund for all of the missing items because the maid admitted to throwing everything away. But she still wouldn't say anything about why she had gone through all of my things or why she had moved anything in the first place.
13. All Was Not Smell
My boyfriend used to work front desk at a hotel, and he said a couple who stayed there for a few days had been complaining since their first night about a really gross smell that they described as "similar to dog poop" coming from the bed. Housekeeping went in as soon as they complained and changed all the sheets. They said the sheets looked perfectly clean.
They complained the next morning saying the smell was still there and were offered a new room. When housekeeping went back in, they were asked to move everything around to see find the source of the smell. Apparently, whoever stayed there before either had an accident or used a sheet to wipe themselves because they found a bed sheet behind the bed covered in poop.
14. Free Flow All
The toilet overflowed so exuberantly that I leaped up to the edge of the bathtub to escape the flow. Then there was the tricky matter of getting from the bathtub to anywhere else without stepping in Lake Toilet. The floor flooded so quickly that there wasn't even time to walk directly out the door. I wasn't going to stand in a filthy puddle looking for the angle valve.
In Hollywood adventure movies, heroes swing from tree to tree by clinging to vines while avoiding lurking crocodiles in the swamp below. My escape was sort of like that, except it involved grabbing the top edge of a hotel bathroom door and leveraging that for extra distance in a leap that barely avoided a floating wad of used toilet paper.
15. Worst Night in Vegas
A few years ago, I was staying at a hotel on the Las Vegas strip, and they had construction going on. Construction related faulty wiring or something kept causing an alarm to go off, and periodically, a recorded voice would say there was some kind of incident and to stay in your room until otherwise notified. All. Night. Long. I couldn’t get any sleep, and I had to get up early and work all day. I was dragging.
16. Solving the Mystery
I had just gotten a ride to my Airbnb, which was a little guest house next to the host's main house in Florida. I guess my hosts had been confused about hearing a car pull up and then seeing an empty driveway. I was also confused because I had realized that they forgot to put extra toilet paper in the bathroom.
Then, we were all very confused when they walked into the guest house and caught me with absolutely no clothes on and walking across the living room, so I could get some paper napkins from the kitchen to solve my toilet problem. We, of course, both rated each other 5/5 stars after my stay at their guest house.
17. If It’s Yellow, I Can’t Mellow
At the peak of Comdex's popularity in Las Vegas, I got stuck at the Tropicana. In those days, the infrastructure in Vegas couldn't handle the Comdex influx. My flight had landed at midnight, but it took me four more hours to actually get to the hotel and then wait again in a 300-person lineup at the front desk.
When I finally collapsed in my bed and entered that hazy almost asleep state, it occurred to me that I was wet. Why should I be wet? I thought hazily. Then my eyes snapped open—I should definitely not be wet. I jumped out of bed and pulled the covers back and found that pee that had soaked out of the mattress.
The sheets were soaked and yellow with it. Clearly the maids realized that the previous guest had wet the bed since they had placed a towel under the fitted sheet. I had been lying in someone else’s actual urine. Even worse? This was my second room as the first room they gave me was occupied by a startled man in his tighty-whities.
rabbidrascal
18. Inn Discomfort
On a work trip, I was put in the most disgusting hotel room to the point where I didn't feel comfortable and couldn't sleep. There was a pile of dirt and dust in the corner that I imagine had taken years to accumulate, brown stains on the lampshades, food under the bed, water damage in the pictures in frames.
The whole room smelt moldy, the hairdryer was sticky, and so was the TV remote, which was also covered in food. There was stuff all over the walls, and there was hair in the shower, and the toilet bowl was stained red. Everything felt gross and grimy. The hot water didn't work in my room. Cold showers, anyone?
I felt like a walking zombie that entire work trip. It felt so disgusting to be in that room that I really couldn't sleep at all. My co-worker in the next room over couldn’t fully shut his room door. He used the latch at the top of the door to close it, but the door was still open a couple of inches. So, he put a chair in front of the door and didn't sleep at all that trip either.
19. Building Resentment
I was in Williston, North Dakota in the year 2000. Construction workers showed up at 11 PM, and began noisily doing work, and started talking loudly right outside our room. After I went and complained to the front desk about the construction, their mood soured, and they pounded on the walls of our room the rest of the night.
20. Shower of Nightmares
I was about four years old at the time, so this is mostly based off my siblings’ stories even though I remember a few still shots. We were at a hotel with some family friends and their kids, and in total there were five of us kids with our ages ranging from 4 to 13. Parents put us all in the same room to chill in the evening as they went out to do adult things.
I was chilling on the bed watching a movie when all of a sudden, we heard a loud noise. The floor vibrated a bit, and then hundreds, if not thousands, of mini spiders started flowing up the walls from two of the bottom corners of the room. We made a butchered attempt to defend our ground by using marshmallows and ice cubes as projectiles.
After our defeat, we huddled up in the bathroom where we had the bottom of the door sealed with a towel. I slept in the bathtub with my sister that night. There were no phones to call for help since this was before kids/teens ever had cells, and we were very clearly instructed to not leave the room under any circumstances.
We really took those instructions a bit too seriously because when my parents came back and discovered the scene in the middle of the night, they probably woke up the whole floor with their initial scream. We were all fine and ended up okay though except my sister still has arachnophobia to this day because of it.
21. Conflicting Parties
I stayed at a Holliday Inn in Toronto, and the rooms around us were all doing...something. It sounded like a party or whatever, but it was a lot of noise. There was a lot of people coming and going, and a lot of people slamming doors. We called the front desk a dozen times, and they didn’t do anything—didn’t kick them out, move them to another floor, NOTHING!
22. Turned Away by the Inn
The wifey and I were on a road trip before Google Maps, and it was late at night. We found a hotel brochure at a roadside rest stop and called to book a room. It was probably a Holiday Inn or something similar. When we got to the hotel, which was about 10 KM off the highway, it seemed nice, and we checked in.
We got in the elevator, and the door opened on our floor. There was one giant after-prom party going on with kids yelling and music playing, and there were drinks all over the place. We didn't even get off the elevator. Fortunately, the staff was understanding, but it was already late, and we had to keep going.
Later, we found a Howard Johnson and pulled in. We get to the desk absolutely exhausted. It was like 2 AM at this point. I thought it couldn’t get worse—I was wrong. The attendant was a young man. He was on the phone clearly at the bad end of a break up. The call went on for at least 20 minutes, and he was very upset. He finished with, "Well, I hope you have a nice life too." He finished his call, and let us book a room.
23. Kicking Back
As customer service manager of central reservation in a resort town, a booking called our office because the kids staying in town for a soccer tournament all ran out to the pool and jumped in. They quickly realized that something was floating in the pool. According to the medical examiner, a man had drowned about eight hours before. My office refunded our 10% commission.
24. We Got It, Sir
The hotel had mandatory valet parking for guests. Guests couldn't park their own cars in the hotel's garage. Visitors had to use numbered parking spots assigned by the attendant. When Dad retrieved his car from valet parking, several things had been taken, including his golf clubs from the trunk even though the hotel maintained that the car had been locked and was "secure" in their parking garage.
25. On the Wrong Level
Last year for Valentine’s Day, I got a room for my wife and I at a really nice hotel. It was pretty expensive, but all the reviews said it was really nice and the rooms were big. We get in, and the staff was extremely rude. We don't look like the kind of people who can afford to spend a lot on a hotel room.
The staff were just really disrespectful to us and mistreated us during our stay. They made us feel like we didn't belong there. We got up to the room, and it was super tiny. It was boiling in the room, and the air conditioning didn't work. We asked the staff if there was a way to fix it, and they just ignored us.
26. Stranded on the Beach
It was on the beach, but the gates to the beach were locked after 10. So, after a late night on the water and visiting a crab shop on a pier, we all walked back to the hotel from the back over about two miles of beach in the dark. But that was when we found out that the gates locked us out, and the buildings were wall-to-wall.
That meant we weren’t able to cross to the front. So, my family and I saw a neighboring hotel, jumped the fence, ran across the closed pool floor, and as we opened the gate to the front of the street, a security light flashed on us, and the light immediately revealed a sign saying trespassers would be prosecuted.
27. Rough All Over
I stayed at a terrible motel in New Jersey because I wanted to go to a concert but didn't want to drive home in the middle of the night. This place was a dump. The "complementary breakfast" was a plate of stale bagels and coffee from a coffee pot that clearly hadn't been cleaned in years.
The door to our room had multiple dents in it from someone kicking it in really hard. Everything everywhere smelled weird. My favorite part of our stay was the couple who was arguing in front of our door at like six in the morning. I'll never forget waking up to "DIANE! YOU’RE AWFUL! I LOVE YOU! DIAAAAAAANE!"
28. Has Its Highs and Lows
I went to a Magic the Gathering tournament in Baltimore with some friends, and we had to stay in a Motel 6 because we couldn't get ourselves together and get a room at a decent hotel sooner. The place was about a block from the light rail, which went right to the convention center. That was about the highest point of the whole trip.
Apart from getting sick and my binder that was worth a few thousand dollars getting taken, the room had a decided dip in one corner where I'm sure the floor was rotting away. When it rained, the bathroom started to leak through the light fixture, and our not so bright roommate put ALL THE TOWELS underneath it.
This meant we couldn't dry off too well the second day because he didn’t use something like, I don't know, the garbage can instead of, again, all of the towels! I know the whole thing was more or less our own fault for not acting faster before hotel prices jumped, but the place was terrible even by Motel 6 standards.
Wikimedia Commons, Michael Rivera
29. Some Water Damage
My girlfriend and I walked into our room after being out all day and felt something wet on the floor. The lights were out, and it was night time, so we couldn't tell what it was. We turned on the lights, and my blood ran cold. The toilet was just broken. It didn't overflow. The tank was just cracked, and water was just everywhere.
The entire room was soaked. We went down to let them know, requested for money back, and asked to cancel the room for that night. They offered us another room instead. Okay, sure. We walked into the new room, and someone was already there. The poor woman looked horrified when she saw us. We got ALL of our cash back after that and left.
30. Over Budgets
In August, we booked a room at a budget hotel. The old lady at the desk gave us our room number, wrote it on the key card holder as they usually do, and we schlepped our baggage upstairs. When we opened the door, we found that there was already a family hanging out in the room. It was mortifying for everyone.
I went downstairs to ask for an unoccupied room, and the lady acted like I had gone into the wrong room. She was like, "no, I told you 330, not 303." I showed her the key holder, and she was still dismissive about it as if it was my fault. And even if it was my fault, I'd have noped out of there immediately.
I was mad because my room key should NOT have opened up a room that wasn't mine... hello? I found another hotel that was close to us and then canceled our second night there. I did this in favor of paying an extra hundred dollars for a hotel where I have already stayed and already knew that it wasn't sketchy.
31. Senior Norman Bates
I caught the creepy old guy who ran the place behind the motel peeking through the window of my room while I was staying there. My work was paying for the place, and I told them that they had to move me now or else I was going to need bail money. I can only imagine what he did in the room while I wasn’t in there.
32. Open Concept Style
Once, I got a hotel room where the bathroom wasn't in a separate room or even closed off at all. One of the walls just had a toilet up against it, and there was a sink off to the other side and a completely glass shower stall. The third of the room that had the bathroom stuff was all tiled, and I would keep stubbing my toe on the ledge back to the carpet. It was weird.
33. Quick Fix Motel
We stayed at a motel in Charlottetown, PEI. Our hotel room was in the basement down a long, dark hallway with half the bulbs burnt out, and around two or three corners, I was fully preparing to meet somebody in the dark. When we got into the room, there was a whole bunch of stuff that was duct-taped together.
The air conditioner had been duct-taped in several places and was actually duct-taped into the window. In the washroom, we found that the shower head had been repaired with, you guessed it, duct tape. There was duct tape that was holding the couch and desk together. It was as if I was staying in Red Green's motel.
34. Boom, Right in the Head
I stayed at a cheap Comfort Inn in Kingsville, TX. When I went to use a blow dryer, I pointed it towards my head and turned it on. Then an object blew out of the dryer, slapped against my forehead, and bounced into the sink. When I realized what it was, I nearly threw up. It was actually a live cockroach that came out.
Flickr, Marco Verch
35. A Whole Lot of Buzz
We choose a ground floor hotel room in Cancun. Unfortunately, there was a gap on the bottom of the front door, and the room was overrun by palmetto bugs. The things fly, and they sound like little helicopters. My girlfriend woke me up asking what the sound was, turned on the light, and they were on the floor, the walls, and on our bed.
We literally just scrambled and put on our clothes after shaking them out a few times and went through the balcony exit. We went to the concierge and demanded a room on the fourth floor. After they saw the room, they stopped arguing with us. They ended up giving us the new room and comped us for dinner and drinks.
36. The City of Ice
It was New York City in January. The window was jammed open, but with the heat on, it just about evened out at around 18 degrees in the room. The door had an extra interior bolt on it because the key cards weren't secure, which we found out at 3 AM when a kind security guard woke us up to ask, “if this door is supposed to be wide open?” Um, no!
The water ran brown and at one point, it wouldn't shut off. I ran to get someone and found a maid. English was her second language, but she spoke it fine. The trouble was that I'm Scottish, and in my blind panic, I forgot the word faucet and kept saying THE TAP BROKE WATER IS COMING OH GOD THE TAP, and she kept saying tap? Tap? And she kept tapping on objects in utter confusion.
By the time we got to the room, it was minutes away from flooding over the side of the tub.
None of that compared to our friends down the hall who found something scary written on their window. When they tried to wipe it off, it was written backwards on the outside, and the window was stuck shut. Great hotel.
37. Waking Up in a Strange Place
I had fallen asleep with the door locked where I was staying the night. I was sleeping in the chair because the bed was broken. I then woke up and saw that there were three homeless guys watching the TV in my room. They seemed pretty cool, and it didn’t really bother me, but it still freaked me out a lot anyways.
38. Backed in a Corner
I was staying somewhere while I was on a business trip. When I got there, I chose a certain type of room fearing a smell, but the room smelt of it anyways. In the bathroom, when I flushed the toilet, it started to overflow. The water flowed over and soaked the carpet. This added to the already terrible smell.
I tried to fix the bathroom situation because housekeeping never arrived. I found out that a load of hair was clogging the drain. I never managed to get all of the hair out. There was no Internet in my room. I didn’t have data, as I arrived late. The only place that had a strong enough signal was in my toilet.
I had to do my work on the bowl. The toilet was clogged and didn’t work. It spat everything back out on the toilet floor. There was also no hot water. I had to boil water to shower. And I learned a good life tip from the best part: check the mini bar to see if any of the alcohol bottles or snacks are opened.
I was charged for a bag of nuts and a mini wine that I did not open. After I paid for it, the receptionist quickly tried to “throw it away,” but was totally just hiding it, so they could put it back to trick someone else. I said, “no, give it to me,” and tossed it in the trash in the lobby where they could see.
39. A Change of Suites
I went to the Luxor for our honeymoon. We got in really late, and we were exhausted from an eight-hour drive. We got to our room and checked the bed. The sheets had boot prints on them, like greasy boot prints. We called housekeeping, and they took over an hour to get there. At this point, we just wanted to sleep.
When housekeeping came, the lady had a seriously bad attitude as if it wasn’t a big deal that our sheets are dirty, so she started replacing them with other badly stained sheets. My wife said, “no, we need clean sheets.” The housekeeper took out the next few sets from her cart, and we saw stains on those.
She said rudely, "I guess these aren't clean enough for you either." I was thinking, “No, you dummy, we want clean sheets. Of course, dirty sheets aren't good enough.” The rest of the room was dark and dingy. First thing in the morning, we went to the Venetian and told them the deal we just went through. They hooked us up a little bit with a WAY nicer room, clean sheets, and a bright room all for about the same price.
40. Making My Bed
I found myself in a small town in Colombia and asked an officer for the cheapest place to stay the night. He pointed me in one direction but also suggested the second cheapest hotel. I dismissed his suggestion figuring I'd be leaving early the next day. I went down to a basement and then knocked on the metal door.
This elderly woman let me in but was surprised that I wanted to stay. I asked her how much for the night, and it took a minute for her to calculate it. We started walking to the room, and from the room next door, emerged a guy and a girl. The guy took out money and paid the old woman for the hour room rental.
That’s when I made a chilling realization. I was staying in a room that had a plywood bed with a blanket for a mattress, and there were some things that, let’s just say, had been freshly used in the trash. There were earrings on the sink, and the shower was just a pipe in the wall. I fell asleep on top of the bed to the sweet sound of Colombians copulating.
41. Better Than Nothing
There were cockroaches everywhere. There were climbing the walls on the bed and in the shower. It was disgusting. We went to the manager/owner to tell him we needed another room or a refund because of all the cockroaches. He said there were no cockroaches in that room…as if we were just hallucinating all these bugs, right?
So, he finally caved and gave us another room. When we got to the room, there was only one cockroach that we could find in the entire place, and we went to take it outside, so we could throw it in the bushes. It was just so early in the morning that both of us stopped caring and just thought, whatever, and went to sleep.
42. Wasn’t Expecting Visitors
I was staying at some seedy place in Montreal. The whole place stunk, but the icing on the cake was that someone came into the room and switched the light during the night, which woke me up. I wasn’t sleeping with any pajamas or anything else really. At the time, I was only 20 and was absolutely terrified to move.
This was my first time spending a night in Canada. So, I just stayed perfectly still while the person stood at the door. After what felt like probably 20 seconds, the light went off, and the person disappeared. I left on a bus to Quebec City early the next morning, so I never found out what that was all about.
43. Ignoring the Signs
On our way back from a trip to Canada, my friends and I stopped at a Motel 6 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was by far the cheapest room we had booked for the entire trip, and we were all already wary of it before we even started seeing all of the anti-substance use billboards lining the highway that was leading up there.
It had been a long, boring day of driving, and we figured it wouldn't much matter where we stayed. We pulled into the parking lot to a shouting match between a car full of people and the management. We kind of sat there building up our nerve before the driver hopped into his car and then peeled out of the lot.
We eventually claimed our room, and we went to get situated. We ignored the crumbs on the floor and set our things down. We were too road weary and hungry to really care about the messiness. We found a menu for a pizza delivery place in our room and got that sorted out before one of us had to go to the toilet.
The bathroom was just overall filthy in general, but there was a dirty, used bandage on the floor, and a bra hanging on the hook on the back of the door. I think any normal person would've left as soon as they saw all of that, but we were young, tired, and figured we would be fine to just tough it out for the night.
For some reason, it didn't occur to us that the bed sheets might be similarly soiled and didn’t think to check, so we went outside to wait for the pizza guy to show up and wandered around a bit outside. They had a basketball hoop that had been dunked on so hard, the hoop was practically parallel to the board as well as missing a net.
We didn't have a ball handy anyway, so it was no great loss. After a few minutes, we saw the manager hastily walk by us followed by someone who we assumed to be another customer. He was speaking in what seemed to us like an official sort of tone, and we just sort of thought someone had complained about their room.
The manager was basically a skinny dweeb with bad acne, glasses, pony tail, etc. The woman following him was rather unpleasant looking, quite large, and wearing grey sweatpants, and a Tweety bird T-shirt. They both disappeared into a room, and we forgot about them for a while. Not five minutes later, they both came out of the room holding hands. So, yeah. Motel 6 in Kalamazoo. Can't say I’d recommend it.
44. Hairy Experience
I had just gotten out of the bath at a hotel in India. I wasn’t clothed to cool off. My boyfriend walks in from using the computer downstairs and alerts me to the big, real life MONKEY sitting in the third or fourth story window ledge peeping at me! I’ve never had a monkey as a peeping tom before or since, I guess.
45. Room by the Lakeside
My girlfriend and I decided too late to spend a couple of days at the beach together, and being in full season, all of the nice hotels around were either full or really expensive at this point. The one we found was only rated two stars and was relatively cheap. We thought well… it couldn't be all that terrible.
When we arrived at the hotel, the maids were still "cleaning" the room as we had to wait for a while. After they finished, we got in, and it was still filthy. There were crumbs all over the floor and bed, the furniture peeled and dirty, and the sheets stained with all colors of what a human is capable of creating.
I won't go into what the bathroom looked like because there are still not enough words in the world to describe it. But the balcony was a lake. It was filled with water and had moss growing in it. I looked around for the drain, but there was none to see. I thought "this is ridiculous," but still wouldn't believe it.
So, I leaned over the edge to see if there's the drain pipe on the outside that came out of the balcony. It was there, but it was on the inside. Everything looked "smooth" in the water. I found a stick and scraped the spot until the drain hole started to show. The water started pouring out, and the day was saved. I ruined what nature was trying to build in that balcony for what appeared to me to be years. The view was nice though…
46. Delayed Arrival
The worst experience I ever had was when I was traveling and ended up in staying at a place halfway to my destination. I was in my room just hanging out. I ordered a pizza from the place on the pamphlet on my bed and waited for it to arrive. That’s when I got the call from the pizza delivery guy apologizing.
He was saying he didn't think he could deliver my food. I asked why, genuinely curious and awaiting a good story about how he ate it or something. No, he said there was about 30 guys in the parking lot creating a bunch of havoc. I walked outside, looked down from the balcony, and watched about 30 guys have it out.
The pizza guy walked the long way and brought me my pizza. I tipped him big for being a bro and taking the long way, and we watched these guys in the parking lot. The pizza guy left. I sat down to eat pizza back in my room and decided to call someone to handle it because, well, someone should. I ended the call and went back to watching TV. Pizza was not good.
47. Stay Hairs
I did a long term stay at a really old motel converted into ''temporary housing'' in Oklahoma. It was across from a cemetery, never got colder than 85F inside, and there were tarantulas and the occasional snake outside the only exit. It was rampant with mice that did not mind crawling on the stove or up your phone charger into your bed.
So, I ended up putting steel wool under each of the legs of the bed and the kitchen table and sprinkling cat hairs around those areas. I had been going to the local liquor store that had cats, so I that’s how I got the cat hair. I bleached everything constantly. I also took power naps in the car when I could.
48. The Better Choice
When I checked myself in, the clerk handed me the remote control for the TV in the room. I thought that was strange, but whatever. In the room, there was a flyswatter just in case we needed it. The water was brown, and everything was dingy. The worst part was that there were only two hotels in the city, and the one we were staying in was supposedly the good one.
49. DIY Hotel
My insurance company booked me a stay at a hotel as temporary housing when my house flooded. The bathrooms were messed up so they were unusable and made the house unlivable, and the floor repair company wouldn't be able to fix anything for two or three weeks. So, what does insurance do? It books us two days at a hotel.
We got swapped around three different hotels only one of which was appropriately sized for our family of four. After the third one, I decided to redo the bathrooms by myself because we couldn't handle even more stress of needing to swap hotels again because they refused to get us a place any longer than a couple days.
50. Fail to Chain
My now husband and I were driving from St. Paul to L.A. and stopped in Rapid City the first night. We had reservations, but they somehow got "lost," so they charged us more for a bigger room. We had been driving all day, it was freezing cold outside, and all we wanted was a hot shower and some food to eat, really.
There was no hot water. There was no room service after 8 PM, and they wouldn't tell us if any restaurants nearby would deliver. At checkout, I tried to get them to reduce our bill AT ALL and pretty much got laughed at. This wasn't even a seedy motel either; it's a large chain that I'm sure could afford to take off $50 for generally being awful.
51. Zero Stars For Lurking
My worst hotel experience ever happened when I was traveling for work. I was alone in a cheap room, but it wasn't horrible. My work was paying for it, so no complaints. But one night, I made an awful realization. The creepy old guy that runs the place behind the motel was peeking in my window, while I was there. I called my work and told them move me now, or I'm going to need bail money. I can only imagine what he did while I wasn't there.
Sources: Reddit,
