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.

The Burlington in Birmingham. The pillows were feather so I asked (at check-in at 3pm) if I could have non-feather ones due to allergy. They agreed to change them. At 9pm they hadn't so I asked again. Went out for dinner, came back at 12.30am asked again and at 1.30am was brought three scatter cushions from a sofa. No tea/coffee in room, so called for room service, to be told their coffee machine wasn't working, and they don't have a kettle in the bar. Don't even get me started on the breakfast! Same as you, OP, thought I was splurging as a treat and wished I'd gone to a Premier Inn!

The glass house Edinburgh six years ago..£150 a night plus £18 each for breakfast.. service so poor, room shabby and this was big bucks for us for dw 50 th.

I had to stay in a hotel in Manchester for a week 25 years ago. On the second night I woke to find the bed - and myself covered in bed bugs. I had been bitten many times by them and you could see their bodies were full of my blood. Soon after this the hotel became a wedding venue, same owners, same bed bugs.

Hotel in Rio, the bathroom was a wetroom, the light didn’t work so I had a shower in the dark, I didn’t realise until I got out that there wasn’t a drain for the shower in the bathroom at all, so the bathroom and bedroom were flooded. Luckily I had put my suitcase on a chair, when I went for a wee in the night the bedding was wet around the edged as it had soaked up the mosquito net.

Marriott in York by the race course, the room (not bathroom) stank of wee, the replacement room did as well, so either lots of guests wee on the carpets or the underlay had been damp and not replaced, the bed had clearly been slept in and each room was generally dirty, very dusty, bits of grass etc on the carpet, mould in the bathroom etc. It was fairly pricey too.

We stayed in a beautiful spa hotel recently, food was amazing, brilliant spa, clean high spec rooms... had a fridge in the room but they still only gave big standard Nescafé tube sachets and Tetley teabags, and 4 tiny uht milk cartons. It's such a shame. A wee fresh milk in the rooms and some decent instant coffee is all that is needed!

First world problems

Went to Boston [USA, not Lincolnshire!]
By 8:00pm local time we were sitting up in bed, watching TV, trying to keep awake although for us it was more like 2:00am.
I slid further down into the bed and it felt oddly cold until I realised the bed was actually wet.
I pull back the sheets and the smell hit me, the lower part of the bed was soaked in urine.
The receptionist failed to understand my Brit accent 'Your bed is soaked in WHAT??' To the point where I was going to shout 'Piss!' or spell out U.R.I.N.E.
Had to move rooms, groggy with lack of sleep, in pyjamas, with other hotel guests going out for their evenings.
Did score us free breakfast, though.

Butlins Minehead. It's a long way to drive only to discover the carpet was so damp there were mushrooms growing under the bed. Back in the car for 5hrs back home.

And a final offering from me a Days Inn on the M1 that we stayed in as a family when DC were small on the way to the Lake District. We had stayed in Premier Inn family rooms that were usually pretty nice and did not appreciate that Days Inn is very much not the same.

The main problem was that the 2 small children had to share the saggiest camp bed known to man. DS went straight to sleep but about 30 mins after lights out I realised that DD was not asleep and was just sobbing quietly. When I asked her what was wrong the bed was so saggy in the middle that they were both rolling together in the dip in the centre. In the end the only way everyone was going to get some sleep was that I had to swop with her so she and DH shared the decent double bed and I spent a very uncomfortable night on a camp bed with a super thin mattress being rolled on by a toddler.

Stayed in a fancy tent thing in Sri Lanka. Pictures made it look so elegant and classy. Reality was moulding on the fabric, two dirty great footprints on the white sofa, a cupboard that blew over in the wind and landed on the bed (we weren't in it at the time but gives me the horrors still). Just awful, and so expensive.

Oh gladly! It’ll hopefully save you the worst holiday of your life. We were on one of the older ships so it was generally dated. We had a junior suite cabin which cost an absolute fortune and was honestly no better than a premier inn room. It’s like a floating prison, I felt so trapped. You’re stuck on a vessel at sea with thousands of other people. There’s nowhere you can go without there being hundreds of other people there. Mostly Americans, they LOVE a Mediterranean cruise. Nothing against them but they grate on me personally. So loud and annoying. When I’m on holiday I love to get out and explore, go for walks, thoroughly check the local area out. You can’t do that in a cruise, after a few days you’ve seen every inch of the ship and it gets very boring and claustrophobic. There’s no freedom. The ship docks at random times and departs at random times, not much consistency with shore time, and limited time on shore which leaves you feeling slightly anxious as if you’re not back on time, it will leave without you. The food was shit. The windjammer buffet where they serve breakfast and lunch was particularly awful. You can’t get a seat because there’s thousands of other people that also want to eat. The premium restaurants were okay but you have to pay extra to eat in them and they’re not cheap, especially given the food. If you’re at sea, good luck getting a sun lounger. If you do get a lounger, you have to listen to the poolside DJ and entertainment blaring deafening chart music at you the entire time. They penny pinch over everything, it becomes very expensive on top of what you’ve already paid for your shit room. For example, if you wanted the onboard WiFi for 7 days it was $150. The spa prices were equally insane it was like $200 for a massage. I felt so bad for the staff, they’re all such lovely people. I got chatting to a few of them, they get no time off. They have to work every single day of their contract for very little pay which does not sit right with me at all. I felt guilty being waited on by them. Boarding was chaos. Disembarking was chaos. Took hours and hours and hours. Totally disorganised. Same for any ports you call in where you have to use the life boat to take you to shore. Waited hours for our turn which meant we only had 2 hours ashore in Montenegro. I’m sure there’s more that I’m forgetting but you get the idea. To me, it was just awful. I absolutely hated it and it cost a fortune. I couldn’t wait to get off. I’ll never go on one again.

The Grand was memorable for all the wrong reasons for us too although we laugh about it now.

Long queue to check in. One bath towel and one hand towel between the two of us. The restaurant stopped serving at 8pm to allow everyone to get ready for the bingo. It was canteen style and very reminiscent of bad school dinners. At breakfast, they didn’t have tablecloths and the tables were made of Formica where the pattern had worn off at each place setting.

Another place we stayed at had no hot water so we couldn’t have a shower before dinner after an afternoon “nap”. During dinner DP was dripped on from a leak which had started in the ceiling above him and the staff didn’t even move us to another table.

Finally, the “luxury castle” that had floors where you had to walk uphill to get across the room and a door which had been hung square but not cut to fit so there was a 3 inch gap at one side as a result. Long refrectory style tables in the dining room you had to share with another couple. They went into the bay window with insufficient room on either side to sit comfortably if you were at that end. The main member of staff, who acted as receptionist, and was serving food, sat down to play piano and didn’t come to take our dessert order for 30 minutes after we had finished our main (and he took the plates away). The owner was swanning around not lifting a finger but asked us how we were enjoying our meal so we told her and she asked us to repeat it to the member of staff (which we told her she could deal with her staff issues herself). Then, in the morning, there was no water at all for the shower.

Might not have been 17 years ago, I was staying in a UK hotel with a smoking floor only 8 years ago.

Stayed in an absolutely hilarious bnb in Scotland, which could definitely have been out of faulty towers!

Our flight had been delayed and we arrived about 9pm and they refused to let us in because it was too late despite us telling them - I had to threaten to ring the bell and wake the other guests before they would open the door.

Beautiful hotel but no beds for the kids, breakfast was dreadful and the woman who ran the place was utterly bonkers! Kept telling me my baby (less than one) was terribly behaved because he work early and that she just used to tell her kids not to wake her before 8!

We were there for a funeral and she kept asking me if I was having a lovely time. You would think that perhaps she was forgetting, but sometimes it was two minutes after asking me about my Nan who had died.

Utterly mental, so much so that it was quite fun!

I have two.

One was a brand new, only recently opened hotel famed for cheap, cheerful stays for the unfussy. It was clean and smart and still smelled of paint.

Two days after my stay, I noticed a line of spots along my shoulder running down my arm. Then more, then more still. They were bedbug bites and I unfortunately had a terrible reaction to them, I was itching mercilessly and swelled up like the elephant man. I complained and they offered me a free night in any of their hotels. I objected rather strongly and was then offered £200 compo and had to sign something to say I wouldn't name them on social media. 😬 It was a good 8 years ago.

The second was a fairly average hotel but reception directed me back out of the hotel building towards some sort of external annexe. I struggled to work out where to go in the dark, and when I eventually dragged my case up two flights of metal outside stairs, I opened the door to a sort of two-room "suite". The sitting room part was large but half empty, with a small couch sitting on filthy looking carpet, a coffee table and a tiny TV on the wall. That meant that there was no TV in the bedroom, which was small and hot.

I went to unpack and on closer inspection, saw rather suspicious looking dried white stains on the bed runner which I swiftly launched into a corner with my foot (not that unusual, it's commonly known as the "cum rag"). Unfortunately there more stains on the duvet, and a blood stain on the sheet. I hurried back out to the sitting room and went to sit on the sofa to call reception - the sofa was festooned with white stains like a plasterers radio. 🤢

I shot out of there like I was on fire and demanded a new room, I wasn't sleeping in there! <shudder>

A 4* hotel which gave us a room with the heating stuck ON in June, and instead of the requested cot for our 12 month old we got a camp bed with half the slats missing. I sat on it before I realised and literally ended up sinking through it with my bum on the floor.

We actively seek out Marriotts for the same reason, at least they seem to be clean and realise you're a paying customer and they're not doing you a favour by allowing you to stay there.

Days Inn Denver Airport. Flight was cancelled and the airline put me in there. Had been staying at the Brown in Denver (5*). Don't mind a cheaper hotel but this was shabby and the sheets had stains. Might have been washed but stained. Grim.
Capital in Knightsbridge. Served me a fresh squeezed orange juice but it was out of a bottle from Tesco or M&S. Charged me about 3x the bottle price. I remarked on this. Don't mind paying for freshly juiced but not supermarket even though it might be branded differently. Same hotel. My room was next to the lift motor. WHIIIIIR, CLUNK, SSSHHHHH,WHIIIIIR,CLUNK,SSSHHHHH all night. That was the sound of the lift motor turning as the lift went up/down. Brakes go on/off depending if it's stopping or starting and SSSHHHHH the doors opening and closing. And no I didn't get a refund. Never had any complaints! Bastards.

Villa Mentone on Isle of Wight - pubic hair all over the duvet cover on one of the beds. Grim breakfast. Odd hotel manager. Sofa in lobby with a sign saying not for sitting on. Awful. Shame of it was it could have been lovely given the location.

Stayed in a bed and breakfast in Wales. To get to the room, you walked through an area which felt like a storage area. The room itself felt dated and unused. The only redeeming feature was that there was a car rally on that day, and we had a good view of the cars.

Seems The Grand is the most ‘popular’ poor hotel on here.

The Conservative candidate for North Yorkshire mayor…wasn’t elected!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/10/scarborough-mayoral-candidate-promises-to-return-grand-hotel-to-former-glory

@NotAllowed thank you so much for the info, its even worse thsn I thought it might be, will swerve it....mudt have been holiday from hell

NC for this because I will get a slagging for my first world problems. But, paying £500-£600 a night in a uk hotel doesn’t get you anything decent now. Service has gone to shit. Covid seems to have given hotels an excuse to get rid of anything “luxury”. Most now don’t do valet parking (even though you always paid through the nose for it), room service has gone by the wayside outside of set times (want a coffee at 6am? Not happening) and god forbid you try and get a drink in the bar after about 10.30pm. In years gone by, there would be a “night porter” who would serve drinks until whatever time you wanted if you were a resident. Everyone behaved well, he got a big tip, everyone was happy. Now you can’t get anything, we recently were told at 10.30pm (after only arriving an hour before due to work/traffic) that we “had to go to bed” in what was a supposedly 5 star hotel.
Pubes in the bed sheets, entirely inadequate sound proofing, dirty underpants in a drawer have been my recent Uk hotel experiences.

No problem. Some people love them, I cannot fathom why. I felt terrible as it was a trip with my mum for our birthdays. We made some good memories but it’s a hard pass to ever go on one again.

Not a hotel but an apartment through booking.com.
Oh my where do I start?
It was abroad. The apartment was accessed via many steep stairs on an unlit staircase, without a handrail until you got half way up.
It had not been cleaned and the smell when we opened the door was vile. Moldy food left in the fridge and wet, smelly washing left in the washing machine.
The ceiling in the bedroom was so low we could not stand up!
The bed still had the sheets on from the last occupants.
None of the bedside lamps were near a socket so Unusable. The only way to get out of the bedroom was down several stairs into the lounge. These stairs did not have a handrail and again because of the height of the ceiling you could not stand up fully. This meant it was incredibly dangerous if you needed to get out of bed during the night and go downstairs, which was where the uncleaned bathroom was.
After contacting the owners they apologised and said a cleaner would come round but we had gone out.
We said we could get back in 15 minutes. When we got back a bag with clean sheets had been left outside the room so I had to crawl about on my knees and make the bed myself.
Added to this was the fact the bedroom was small and the bed filled the entire width of the room so you could not get around the bed.
Booking.com refused to give a refund stating that we were out when the cleaner came round!
Even though we arrived later than the stated check in time.