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.

Just in case anyone reads this and thinks this is possible - it isn’t

One of those small rural hotels with supposedly amazing restaurants. We booked thinking it would be a relaxing, romantic weekend; local hikes and then back to a roaring fire and gorgeous food.

When we entered the public bar everyone fell silent and stared at us including the bar staff who had to find the manager to check us in. Room was directly above the public bar and there wasn't a hint of soundproofing so we heard them all scoffing at the 'Londoners' and it turns out they have lock ins until 3am when they got louder and louder and seemed to have half the village arrive.

It fell silent for about 90 minutes when the breakfast chef and cleaners arrived around 5am and put their music on loud.

It cost a bloody fortune. All of the reviews were amazing and not one mentioned the racket. Food was actually pretty good though

Surely this one wins. What the actual fuck?! I would have gone mad. Why the hell was he doing it there???? 🤢

Hilton Metropole Birmingham

Food wasn't great and service was poor. TV didn't work. Noisy smokers allowed to hand out outside quite late into the evening disturbing nearby rooms.

Weak apologies when we complained, but pretty much didn't care. No percentage refunded. Expensive room. Won't stay there again, and we go to events there every year.

When I was a student a group of us decided to go to Amsterdam. It was pre-internet, so can't remember how we booked the hotel, but I know that low price was a key feature. When we arrived, it was in the red light district. Our rooms were in the basement, so the only windows were at the top of the walls, just level with the pavement outside - just the right height to waft in all the lovely bodily aromas generated out on the streets.
The beds were foilthy, and felt like they hadn't been replaced for at least a century: there were big dips in the middle, and we discovered later in the trip that they were infested with bed bugs.
As with many PPs, it was terrible at the time, but made for good stories afterwards.

Not a hotel room but a caravan at Sandy Balls (never forget that name) my toddler was throwing up and as I cleaned vomit from the floor the wipes were black with grime and pubic hair (not ours!)

Dog hair on the sofa, dead insects, stale cigarette smell and the fridge was covered in milk crust although since reading other stories here I’m really hoping it was just milk.

Mine is nowhere near as bad as most of these but it rankles because it was so horrendously expensive. We went on an VERY expensive holiday with tours of gardens included. We stayed in a hotel in Devon. It gets very much hyped up because it belongs to The Hotel Inspector. The grounds are stunning but the hotel underwhelming. I often wondered if she had ever inspected her own hotel 😂We had a tiny room overlooking the car park. I swear the carpet was like a coir doormat underfoot and a radiator was leaking on it.
The manager was like a sergeant major herding the guests about the place. Each evening he was ordering us outside into the garden when we were just heading to the bar for a drink and just generally being bossy and unpleasant.
The worst thing was the food not the quality but the quantity. We were starving the whole time we were there. We had to choose at breakfast time what we wanted to eat for dinner that night . The tiny portions of what we had chosen were just not enough food. One night myself and another guest asked if we could just have some cheese and crackers after our meal as we were still hungry. The manager said there was no cheese left but he could look in the bin for us to see if any had been thrown away in there!
The staff all left the premises at night. I don’t know what would have happened if someone had taken ill or a fire had broken out. Presumably there was some sort of night porter.
Then to cap it all off when we got home we found out that someone had used our credit card details to buy £3000 of agricultural equipment in the local town. The gardens we visited were nice though.

a large hotel in Derby. The hotel itself was lovely but at 1 am we were woken by a man screaming abuse in the room next to us it was horrendous verbal abuse and a woman was screaming. I rang the front desk who rang the police. I then heard the police come up and talk to the man who managed to explain himself away the police officer actually said ‘We will overlook it this time ‘ and then gave him a mild ticking off. So disheartening

Travelodge Croydon. Disgusting and full of drug addicts and loud music. I left after 20 mins.

@Whycantiwinmillionsandsquillions we had a similar experience in Valencia on a flat that was obviously the owners flat- it was utterly dire, dirty and didn't have the 2 bedrooms it stated. Goodness knows what pictures he used on booking.com as it wasn't this flat and reviews didn't match We made our excuses and left the next morning ( having taken photos) losing £450 in process and quickly checking into an ok hotel - we got a full refund too a week later.

The Peninsula in Tokyo.
Paid an absolute fortune for 2 nights at the end of our trip as a treat. It is dated and noisy. Such a letdown.

A Sonder hotel in Amsterdam next to Vondelpark. Reviews said it was tiny. Blimey. The bed fitted sideways into the room. Dh had to crawl over me to get out. (Not as sexy as it sounds) Wet room, so by the end of the weekend the bathmat was soaked. Eco, which means basically no maid service. Nowhere to store case. A hanging rail 12 inches long. And the swish seafood restaurant next door overflowed the public bin outside with shells etc. Came back to an unholy stink and rats.
Anything Brittania is usually awful.

@housethatbuiltme had a similar experience about 13 years ago, we stayed one night out of 3 night stay.. but have very fond memories as a young child going to Pontins in Southport in the 70s, such a shame it's gone down hill

Fee very fortunate reading this thread that we’ve never had a bad hotel stay. Only one a bit dodgy was a Gatwick hotel the night before a flight. The bed was squishy and sunk in the middle, some sort of loud plumbing in the room and no shower curtain despite it very much being needed. Just made a note of the hotel to not stay there again before a flight.

A Best Western hotel somewhere off the A1 M heading London way for a work conference , checked into the room and discovered the previous occupant had left what looked like a black crash helmet on the bathroom floor or so I thought without the light on , switched on the light and to my horror it was an ants nest !! Ran for my life !

Oh two more. One a hotel in Luxor booked as part of an excursion. Probably in the 50s it was the height of elegance. Lots of dark wood panelling, carpets. Room had 3 single beds, with wool blankets, in August in Egypt. The ac was ancient and puthered out warm air (I just kept thinking Legionaires..) But the lovely brothers that ran it had got the pool ready on the roof (no one brought cossies) and we had dinner up.there to the sounds of the call to prayer watching darkness fall.
And a bnb in Glastonbury. It was a tiny terrace, run by proper hippies. The bedroom though had been done beautifully but, the communal tiny bathroom had a saniflo loo and couldn't be used after 10pm because of the noise. If you needed the loo you had to go downstairs to the back of the house to use their bathroom. No good when you are my age.

We stayed at a small independent hotel in a lovely Tudor building that looked lovely from the outside - for some unknown reason I didn't check the trip advisor reviews as there wasn't much choice in the area. I thought it looked quirky and more interesting than the premier inn down the road.

The bed had springs sticking up through the mattress that was clearly decades old that dug us in the ribs. There was mould around the windows, and the central heating didn't work so they had plug in oil radiators in the room. The bathroom was behind a concertina door that didn't close properly and the shower was barely more than a dribble.

There was one staff member in the whole place and he was running the check in desk and the bar at the same time. Hadn't got time to change hotels because we had tickets to a show. Absolute shambles. Premier inn all the way from then on!

Best Western Canary Wharf - mopeds circling outside, hookers, druggies and loud music

that’s where HR wanted me to stay on my own 😭

I felt so unsafe, I nervously walked over to the Hilton who were amazing (and served me free hot chocolate and chocolate cake to welcome me & calm me down as I was visibly anxious!)

I wonder if the Best Western is still there?!

Fellbrigg Lodges in Norfolk. Advertised as 'boutique 5* luxury lodges. Yeah, really don't think so, mate. Seventies style, cellular blankets on the bed and the pillows smelt of greasy hair. There were 2 dead flies in the bath tub to welcome us and the cold tap squealed when turned on. The heavily swagged and tailed curtains were sun faded and looked like they'd been used as set dressing on Crossroads.

Bizarrely Fellbrigg Lodges makes an appearance in The Running Grave the latest Robert Galbraith novel!

Not disappointing so much as a bonkers experience. We were in Phoenix, had a traffic accident (driver turning right smashed into us). Spoke to the lovely cop who turned up and gave us his personal number because after he’d dealt with the accident, my Dh told him he was also in the police.

Then we turned up at the hotel, built into the mountain side, all very lovely. Trotted off to the nearest garage/off licence to stock up on a bottle for the room, sky went purple, rain went mental, we drove on the wrong side of the road at like 2 mph because our side was flooded. Got back to the hotel and were asked to wait at the bar and to ask for a complimentary bottle. Our room had flooded. They’d rescued our luggage which was of course on the floor and re-roomed us in a non-flooded room. Apparently, cars were floating down the street! Next morning, there was nothing to see. Altogether bizarre.

The Mitre across the road from Hampton Court. Awful. It was during a heat wave, not the hotel's fault obviously, but the room was boiling. It was so hot my youngest woke up at midnight crying because they were so hot. Had the patio doors open to let some air in and a drunken hotel guest wandered in wanting to know where the toilet was!

Then between 2:00 and 3:30 the guest in the room above us decided to walk up and down constantly with the creakiest floorboards you have ever heard. We got no sleep.

The next morning we had issues with overcharging on the bill too. A very expensive stay that was pretty rubbish.

Thought of another! Stayed in the accommodation linked to a pub last year and the pub closed at 10pm, so no staff after that. It’s at the end of a dead end, middle of nowhere by a big river. I swear you could be murdered and chucked in the river and nobody would ever know. Felt a bit scary as a lone female. Great for serial killers.

Plentiful hot water but the bathroom door, when shut, revealed absolute filth, as did the area behind the loo, which was the view as you had a bath. Carpark was flooded, so getting the wheely suitcase to the room was fun.

I was doing a trade show at the beautiful Burghley house and needed a cheap close hotel.

Booked online, cheap but decent looking. Oh no no. It was a halfway house for men leaving prison (no mentionof this on booking.com). The reception staff were stunned when i went to check in and asked if I was sure I wanted to stay 😆

Lots of noise, lots of exotic scents and 3 human turds on the stairs and 2 puddles of sick minimum each morning!

Weirdest thing, though...my H (then boyfriend) came to stay one night and we had the best sex ever. Wtf was that all about. I didn't put that on booking.com reviews.

There is no hot water in the mildly disappointing hotel this morning. An engineer is on the way, which is not much use to me cos I'm leaving this morning. Breakfast was ok. No croissants though. Bit disappointing. So to conclude: bit disappointing.

Should any of you be visiting the Highlands this summer, I'd advise avoiding the Macdonald Aviemore Hotel. It's... a bit disappointing.