What's been your most disappointing hotel experience?

[QuintessentialQuokka]

This is inspired by the fact that I'm having a mildly but nigglingly disappointing hotel experience right now. The room is clean and has everything you'd expect - but it's a bit shabby and a bit small and the bath is half length and the kettle has exactly one free tea bag and one stick of coffee granules and one mini capsule of milk and the carpet looks like it came from a conference centre in 1991 and the lift is a claustrophobe's nightmare and takes a week and a half to arrive when summoned. In short, it feels like a 60 quid hotel room and I paid 200 for it as a rare treat, more fool me.

If you'd like to, please make me feel somewhat better by sharing your most disappointing/worst hotel experiences. Thanks.

Recently? Lodore falls in the lakes

Travel Lodge in Southampton.

It was filthy with wet carpet and no hot water.

We had booked a family room but it was made up as a double. Went to ask them to put it right and handed me a pile of sheets.

It was 11 pm and we had young kids. We were just using it as a stop over so we couldn't just leave and try to find something else.

Hadn't read the trip advisor before we went because it was a short stop over and stupidly assumed that as a hotel chain it would have a basic standard. We read them that night and everyone said DO NOT STAY THERE. Lesson learned.

5* Dreams Aventuras on the Riviera Maya in Mexico. The images make it look like it's a tropical paradise with a white sandy beach... But the beach is artificial. Think coarse playground sand on top of concrete. And the food was school dinner quality. So disappointing that we left after 2 nights and booked ourselves into a proper tropical paradise for the rest of the holiday, despite the fact that we'd prepaid and lost all the money! Life is just too short.

Close second: Radisson London Stansted. Just filthy, filthy, filthy. Every surface and all soft furnishings stained and sticky and absolutely yucky. I had booked through Expedia and when I sent them pictures they refunded me the full amount immediately, without even asking any more questions. It was that bad.

We stayed in a 4 star hotel in Mallorca recently, 2 adults + 2 kids (one being a teen).

The bathroom door was a screen door, and it wasn’t floor to ceiling, and also had inches of a gap to the side. There was no privacy at all, you could literally see and hear if a person was on the toilet. We made the best of the situation, but it was downright bizarre. I’ve since checked Tripadvisor reviews, and other people have mentioned it but not made a huge issue of it.

We had items stolen by housekeeping at another hotel - my mum’s watch and an expensive hoodie of DD’s. We were absolutely 100% sure it was staff, as it happened when we were out when they had cleaned, and the room clearly had not been broken into.

We've stayed at lots of places and many b&bs where you wonder how they got the bed in.

OH stayed at a nice looking older hotel in London. His colleague had a nice room, he was in a room nor much bigger than a closet. He could lie in bed and open the en-suite door on one side and the window on the other. He had to shuffle past the bed to get into the en-suite as you couldn't walk past the bed normally. No bath, sink,shower and toilet. When he went in the chair was on the bed as the only place fir it was in the door passage next to the en-suite. It was over £100 (1990s), so not cheap.

He asked for a different room but that was all they had (full) and ladies get the better room. The hotel was booked by the companies booking service. He called the next day and said if they didn't move him he was going home.

They moved him to a different hotel that day.

I stayed in the Grand Scarborough for an A level marine biology trip - about 40 years ago. We were very happy - 3 course breakfast, lunch and dinner provided. We had the basement grill bar as our project room and spent the week dragging wet lumps of seaweed around and being served gin and tonics at age 16 or 17.
Apparently most schools went to hostels or camped so we felt like winners😂

An overnight stay before I flew to Spain, it was an awful family run hotel near to the airport, the bed hadn't been changed, the carpet was so old it was crispy around the edges, it had a metal rack as a wardrobe and one drab picture on the wall, it was like a forgotten room in a big house that hadn't been updated since the 1980s. It was my first time travelling on my own and I sat on the edge of the bed and cried. The couple who had recently taken it over weren't friendly and wanted me to pay in cash which I didn't have as their website said they accepted card payments, they then tried to get me to walk about a mile into town to a cash point I refused and they begrudgingly accepted a card payment. I left a bad review

Newport bay at Disneyland Paris, was filthy in the corners, under bed etc, obviously not been cleaned properly for weeks, they did clean it thoroughly the next day and gave us £50 credit, I sent my pictures to bbc watchdog and they were featured on a programme! (The fact it's so expensive does make a difference too, I've experienced somewhat shoddy cleaning before but when you have paid a cheap rate you overlook it)

A hotel room with no windows, which we discovered when we opened the curtains - they had painted a view on the wall behind them! Quite amusing looking back, but felt very claustrophobic at the time.

Oh so many (travelling with work over the years).

1. london. Gritty basement room and you hear the tube running under it. Got undressed to shower before evening festivities. Shower didn't work. Reception sent a man with a hammer to 'fix it'. He bashed it and it still didn't work. So they sent a different man with a dressing gown so I could walk through the hotel to a room with a working shower. But only to use the shower then back to the basement. I refused, grabbed the key, picked up my bags and marched through the hotel to the replacement room. Bumped into several colleagues on the way. Me naked except for a dressing giwn, with a grumpy porter following me, carrying my bag. 😂😂 took je months to live that down.

In Barcelona, booked a room with a private bathroom but on arrival was given one with a shared bathroom. Was told there had been some kind of mix up. Unfortunately a huge city-wide festival was on at the same time and couldn't find any other hotel to stay at. They didn't even offer a discount (I had to ask for it).

We've just got back from Disneyland Paris. Stayed in the explorers hotel.
It was horrendously expensive for food. The Disney park was actually cheaper for food!
The taps didn't turn properly in bathroom due to the like scale.
There was a soft play with material ripped off certain bits and wood sticking out.
Each morning we were all waking up covered in bites.
And the electric went off the last day! So there was no food available, no hot water and no way to charge our phones.
Carpets in our room had old Chewing gum stuck all over and the widows wouldn't open.

I have travelled in all kinds of places and a grotty-ish hotel doesn’t usually bother me as it’s been cheap or expected etc However I was so disappointed when I stayed at sequoia lodge at Disneyland Paris. I think because it was so expensive for two nights and we’d come from a hotel in Paris which was cheaper but perfect. It was brown, pokey room, weird lighting (bathroom light turned on the entrance light - not good in a family room), worn, outdated and the toilet didn’t flush properly. I was just a bit disappointed because I’d expected “Disney magic”.

I've stayed in comedic Fawlty Towers stuck in the past type places like the Beach Hotel in Worthing, but the worst was Moonfleet Manor which was v expensive and which was supposed to have a pool (missing tiles, mould, awful changing rooms), creche (child walked out and wasn't stopped), inside play area (full of broken toys, roof had leaked so was mouldy), the hotel itself was supposed to be "shabby chic" but in reality the carpet was threadbare and the emergency lights didn't work which we found out when the fire alarm went off in the night.

A previous guest had left a happy ending in a towel and just folded it back up again so it looked pristine and clearly the cleaners thought so too as they left it where it was on the bathroom shelf thinking they didn't need to replace it. I went in for a shower, grabbed it to get dry, opened it and was just about to wipe my face with it when I realised there was a hard yellowish stain right in the middle.

Went downstairs to complain and wasn't taken seriously, so went back again with aforementioned towel and threw it at the manager, shouting 'I could have got HIV from that!'.

Yes, it was a tad melodramatic on my part but, fuck me, some random bloke's gizz all over your face is not a good way to start the day.

It was London, in a rather nice hotel 😱I got a full refund 🙂

If you have time are you able to postba bit of info, friend keeps banging on about me tryingba cruise

Silverstone. "Hotel" made out of shipping containers. Tiny, noisy,claustrophobic and boiling hot.
The swan in Harrogate. Terrible fawlty towers place.
Premier inn, Luton. Damp and smelly.
VRBO place in Tenerife. Full of Knick knacks, broken furniture and rusted barbecues. They had it thrown anything out in years, but wanted to whack in august.
Favourite hotel is the fish in the Cotswolds. Absolutely beautiful.

A castle hotel in North Yorkshire. £££, states its luxury but really not very clean at all, rooms had random bits of furniture in them not in keeping with the style (random black pleather sofa with a huge rip in it in a period room), every single bill you receive will be wrong one way or another. Could be amazing but was just a let down.

About 30 mins away from Maidstone - not far from Canterbury. I knew it as a friend's family home when I was a child. It's an absolute travesty.

A Marriott hotel
bogey on the wall
skidmark in the toilet
tv didn’t work
and reception fobbed me off about it instead of just apologising and giving me a different room or money off

Adina Aparthotel in Darling Harbour, Sydney.
Fabulous location. Hotel was a hole.
Shabby and dirty. Late checking in so dropped bags and went out for dinner. Collapsed in bed later - looked at the ceiling and cockroach was running across..... barely slept.
Got up the next day and moved the sofa in the living room - the amount of food under the sofa could have fed a family of 4 for a week. Not really surprising that there were cockroaches 🤮

I was just about to mention the Explorer. It is a dump! I stayed there probably 20 years ago when it first opened and it was great. Took dd 5 years ago and I don’t think it had been cleaned since I’d been the first time. Threadbare carpets, smell of wee in the rooms. Just yuck

Mercure in Sheffield. Booked it for a conference as it has a pool - only to find out that guests have to pay £10 to use the pool. £140 per night. Breakfast not included. Only one pack of biscuits in a double room. Premier Inn next time.

Turned up after a 9 hour drive to find the hotel in darkness. Power cut. No lighting, no water supply as it relied on an electric pump. Had a really important course locally the next day, and no hotels with space within an hour. And certainly couldn't drive another 9 hours back home. Luckily got power and thus water back in time for getting up in the morning.

Youngest DD was going to Leeds festival the summer of 2021, just after Covid. DH and I decided to spend the weekend in Harrogate so we could enjoy a nice weekend and taxi her to Leeds and back home rather than driving there and back twice. I booked a place called the Cairn Hotel. It was £750 for three nights, and it was an absolute shithole. The same room is £65 a night now. It shows how inflated post-Covid prices were. I’d just assumed that at £250 a night it would be really nice.