OT:Ever Stay In A Lousy Hotel/Motel??

[mykneesareback]

We are planning a road trip from northern Calif. to the Dallas, Texas area the end of April. Have you ever stayed in a really bad hotel/motel, and will you please tell me the brand name so I can beware??

Thank you, I'll appreciate your advice.



Doris

[jezzie]

I was only in two bad ones.

One old hotel in Manhattan that wasn't a chain hotel. Was a gem at one time. No longer.
3/4 size beds - very old unreliable plumbing - roaches.

The other was Motel 8. Our whole team left early evening and checked into another one.
But we had been been at another Motel 8 that was OK. ..... So I guess I'm no help.

.

[tatehouse]

We stayed in one in NOLA that was mildewed...hard not to be mildewed in SWLouisiana but the pillow and the back of the spread...eek...it was a chain but I don't remember which one but I think it all depends on the management. So I'm not much help either.

AAA has a guide book that is pretty trustworthy...takes each hotel in a city and rates it...as opposed to the entire chain. We used that (and the discounts) on many road trips to unfamiliar places...have fun...that is the main thing.

[mykneesareback]

Thanks folks. I've never heard of "3/4" size beds???? Is that what they use in model homes so the rooms look bigger?

Oh sure, we belong to AAA and use those guide books all the time, except they are not always "true" to real life................I guess sometimes you have to go with your instincts and stick to your first impression when you see the place, or walk into the lobby/office to register. I have heard some bad stories about the mildew and that type of problem though, and using your wipes on everything in the room as soon as you get in there. Even before H1N1 I mean.



D

[hdyhouse]

Doris, about 30 years ago when we were driving back from Texas, we pulled into Muskogee, OK late one evening and I stopped at a non-chain motel that will forever live in the collective family memory as the "Easter Roach Motel". I should have suspected something when I had to pay for the room before seeing it.

One thing that I do now is look on travelocity.com for a hotel in a city. The listings usually include reviews and comments from people who have stayed there, along with the date of their stay. I find that a good way to screen out hotels/motels from consideration.

[birdlady]

Would price have anything to do with it?We have been to a few but most were picked by bird people that lived in that area.

[mykneesareback]

Oh my Henry, lol lol. Brings all kinds of pictures to my mind.

Gladys, I think we have to think a higher price than we did when we did this in 2006, what used to be $75 per night then is $100 or so now. Or at least $90, my dh loves an indoor swimming pool each evening. Just a personal quirk of his. And we will have his 80 year old Mother along too, for the ride. But she will get her own room.................

I have been on the Trip Advisor site, where they do have comments from people, I will check there too, when I have an inkling as to the cities we will actually be staying at. Should have an itinerary figured out by end of next week.

Thanks!!

D

[Molly1950]

OMG! You made me remember a night we spent in a little motel in northern Iowa. It was in a tiny town on the Mississippi River. We woke up in the wee hours of the morning soaking wet! The mattress was oozing water! The next morning we asked at the desk what happened. She told us that they had run the mattresses through a car wash to clean them. Yikes! How dumb is that??? They didn't charge us.

[tatehouse]

Molly, that is the funniest thing I have heard in a long time. I'm going to tell that story at the party I'm going to tomorrow...I'll give you credit of course!!! Too funny!!! THE CAR WASH??? hahahaha

[GME]

We tried to take a "budget" trip to Disneyland one year and made a reservation at a non-chain not too far from the park. The pictures looked fine.

I paid for the room in cash (Dumb, dumb, dumb, but trying not to do any credit cards.... budget trip remember) and left after we took one look at it. My kids were toddlers so they kicked thier shoes off and started to run around as soon as we got there (5 hours in the car) and their little socks were filthy after a few minutes. It was all-around yucky.

Now we only stay at chains and pay with an AmEx.

[mod9032]

And now I am hearing that even top-rated hotels/motels are having bed bug problems. Those are REALLY hard to get rid of. And you take them home in your luggage. UGH!

[mykneesareback]

Yep, that is one funny story, can't wait to tell dh when he gets back from his walk.

I've heard of the bed bug thing too. And then there are the bugs that each one of us bring into each room we stay in, lol. Oh well, what are yah gonna do? We need to go to our son's wedding, so we will bite the bullet anyway.


Doris

[Joplin38]

This is my best story. I took my 3 girls on a trip to Silver Dollar City near Branson. A motel we stayed in apparently had a skunk caught in the ventilation system. When we called about it, their solution was to come and spray our room with bug spray. I couldn't believe it.

[LoveMontana]

Originally Posted by hdyhouse

Doris, about 30 years ago when we were driving back from Texas, we pulled into Muskogee, OK late one evening and I stopped at a non-chain motel that will forever live in the collective family memory as the "Easter Roach Motel". I should have suspected something when I had to pay for the room before seeing it.

One thing that I do now is look on travelocity.com for a hotel in a city. The listings usually include reviews and comments from people who have stayed there, along with the date of their stay. I find that a good way to screen out hotels/motels from consideration.

Been there, done that. Travelocity is the way to go. Check them out.

[mykneesareback]

Remember the story about the German tourists visiting in Miami, who complained about a "bad smell" in their room, and the cleaners came in and sprayed Febreeze several times? Finally, the husband tourist kneeled down and looked under the bed, and it was a dead body????


In 2005, we checked into a Fairfield Inn after 8:30pm, and the clerk gave us a room quickly, we went up, opened the door and started to set our luggage up. I noticed some McDonald's hamburgers on the nightstand, and then turned the light in the bathroom on, and there were towels and women's makeup and mans shaving stuff on the counter. Some other people had the room, but lucky for us all, they were out for some reason. We tore out of there fast, and went down and gave the clerk heck. He switched our rooms, but I had to contact the manager who was out of town due to a funeral, and she gave us all kinds of hotel points because of it all. Just think if those people would have been in bed


Janie, I've smelled skunk in a motel room before, lol lol.



Doris

[mommedawne]

I found this thread when I searched for a post I made about Disneyland.

The Hyatt Regency in Long Beach, CA is awful. We have a friend who lives in Long Beach so we stayed there in order to facilitate meeting up with her for dinner during our last trip.

It looks great in pictures. What a contrast to reality! I felt like I was in a shopping mall when I entered the building. I could have overcome that if not for the sleeping experience. The walls were paper thin to the extent that I was afraid to talk in a normal speaking voice during the day.

The evening we stayed there, we were awakened by music so loud that I actually thought someone had busted in to our door with a boom box or something. Drunken fools were in the room next door. We called the front desk. Someone came upstairs to tell them there was a complaint. Not a full minute after the person at the desk left, all of the people next door started right back up again. I KNOW that the person who was walking away heard it and didn't want more confrontation. We called the front desk again. They eventually came back up and addressed the problem again. We heard the people in the room telling them there was no noise and the management said that they shouldn't worry about the complaints then. :|

I was SO MAD. They partied until almost 4 in the morning and purposely banged on the wall to upset us even more. My kids cried because they were scared. We couldn't leave without going into an unlit parking garage in the middle of the night. I hear they treat their corporate clients better but I thought it was awful and I would avoid returning like the plague!

[Steve Parker, M.D.]

I've learned to be wary of the pictures of hotels posted online. Found out the hard way that special camera lenses (wide-angle) can make a jacuzzi-sized pool look like an olympic pool.

That was in Payson, Arizona.

-Steve

[Raini]

Originally Posted by mod9032

And now I am hearing that even top-rated hotels/motels are having bed bug problems. Those are REALLY hard to get rid of. And you take them home in your luggage. UGH!

When I get to a hotel, the first thing I do, once in my room, is lift the sheets from the mattress and look for bugs in the corner. I watched a story on the evening news once, and they suggested this. I've never found any bugs, but I always hit the shower and scrub really well as soon as we get home. And our PJs go straight to the laundry... we never wear PJs to bed at home that we've worn in a hotel. Not sure that guarantees anything, but that's what we do.

Years ago we were traveling home from Disneyland. DH thought he could drive straight through, but we all got too tired to keep going. Every single hotel was fully booked; and we kept driving from one town to another, hoping to see a Vacancy sign. Finally, in some small town near a "Split Pea Anderson's" restaurant, we found a little motel with a Vacancy sign lit up. DH went to the office and asked how much it would be. It was $40, which was actually kind of steep for way back then; but we were exhausted and wanted to get to sleep. It was about 3 a.m.

When DH turned on the lights in the room, he (later) said that he saw bugs scatter every which way. (I hadn't seen them or I wouldn't have gone in at all.) The room smelled very strange and had huge stains all over the wallpaper.We later found out that it was bug spray that had been sprayed all over the walls. (Didn't do any good!) While I was in the shower, DH called out to me to ask what a bedbug looked like. I freaked!

We put all 3 boys in one of the beds, and DD in a drawer from the dresser. (She was about 6 pounds by then.) As soon as everyone (except me) was asleep, some drunk truckers took the room next to ours. They were really noisy and kept running into things and banging on the walls. I was terrified when one of them decided that the door between our rooms must be the door to their bathroom. He pounded on the door and shook it and scared me half to death. I couldn't wake DH, so I just sat there in the bed shaking like a leaf. I never did sleep. DH and the kids slept about 4 or 5 hours, and we left. I'd have to say that was the worst place we ever stayed.

As far as more recent experiences go, I'd have to say that LaQuinta is the worst chain we've stayed in. In Florida last fall, we walked into the room and it seemed nice enough. But I knocked my pill container off the dresser and it fell between the dresser and the wall. When we moved the dresser, everything was so grossly dirty that we didn't really want to stay there. However, it was past midnight and we had nowhere else to go, so we stayed.

While we were on our cruise, we got an e-mail from the hotel asking us to rate our stay as a "10." I replied, saying that we had some problems with lack of cleanliness; but we'd be back in 10 days and if they gave us a clean room, we'd be happy to give them a "10." So they had 10 days to "clean up their act." All they had to do is have ONE clean room!

So, we checked in 10 days later. The room was dirty, and we told the desk clerk. He gave us another room key.... this room was worse than the first. Then a third room key... it smelled so nasty that DH gagged and said we'd take the first room. The carpet was dirty, it was dirty behind the furniture again, the bathroom door looked like someone had puked on it... just everything was nasty. To top it all off, we'd just gotten to sleep and about 11:30 pm someone knocked on our door and then tried to open it. I called the front desk, and they said that it was just Security checking on our complaint about the dirty room! Why at 11:30 when we'd complained at 8? Why did they try to open the door? I was totally freaked out and didn't get to sleep until it was almost time to get up. We wrote to LaQuinta and didn't even get an apology. I FAXed them another letter and never heard back from them.

Someone on the internet made the comment that LaQuinta is getting better, but we'll never stay there again.

[mykneesareback]

My oh My Raina!!! What a tale of woe, makes me afraid to go, lol. Was that one with the Pea Soup Anderson in Santa Nella!!!???? We had a bad experience at a La Quinta in Midland, Texas, also, we had to stay there because nothing else available too. Was not clean, and the receptionist was a real a-hat, if you get my drift.

Our first night we are staying at a Hampton Inn, down in Bakersfield, and it has only been open 8 months, so will see how messed it is or not I guess.

We are "winging" it the rest of the way to our son's town.



Doris

[Raini]

Doris- The Hampton Inn should be great. They have the nicest linens and bedding! And if it's only 8 months old, it should be fine.

I also had an interesting experience in Copperas Cove, Texas when our DD was stationed at Ft. Hood. She was having emergency surgery, and I was able to stay on base at Fisher House. Once she was back in her own place, I wanted to stay closer to her apartment. There was a very nice hotel, but they had this cute little sign in the lobby about a "Cricket Convention." They explained that once a year they are deluged with crickets, and there was not much they could do about it.

I had the option of staying on at Fisher House, which was really a lovely place to stay. But my SIL wanted to go to the hotel. The management let us look at the room in advance, and we only saw one or two crickets along the way. Not too threatening, so we booked the room. That night, however, the parking lot had millions upon millions of crickets, and reminded us of a Hitchcock film. We drove through them, windshield wipers frantically waving, and still barely able to see the road. The crunching of crickets under the tires made a sickening sound. When we got out of the car, we had to make a run for the door through all of those crickets; and once inside, the smell from smashed crickets was disgusting. SIL was wishing she hadn't insisted we leave the base!

BTW, the annual "Cricket Convention" is in October, so you should be fine!

[mykneesareback]

That smell of dead crickets is still in my head too, we had several invasions of them when I was younger and we lived down near Fresno, in the San Joaquin valley, and those danged things came through our town! As you say, the crunch of them, you couldn't really walk without "crunching" on them either!! lol At the phone company where my parents worked, the crickets filled the wall where the sun was beating on it, and on the doors, the people inside put wet towels and rags down to try to keep them out. Almost biblecal type of thing. Hadn't thought of those times in ages Raini, lol, wow!!!


D