Post your hotel/motel horror stories here

[KitchenWitch]

Inspired by Jilly Beans

[DBoon]

1. Business travel too?

I have some truly horrific ones in that case.

On Edit:

Here goes. Fly to Dallas for business, expecting to get in around 10pm. Connecting flight is canceled. I call the hotel from the airport to let them know I will be late. It's very noisy, and the woman at the other end is not speaking up, but I try to make it clear to hold the room.

We are told there are a limited number of seats on a flight on another airline. I run with all my luggage over to the terminal, and am one of the last 5 people to get on. Did I mention that I hadn't eaten all day, and of course I don't have time to grab anything at the airport.

I get into Dallas and take a cab to the hotel. It is 1AM. I show up at the registration desk and they have pulled the room out from under me. Despite my earlier phone call (and a credit card guaranteed reservation) I have absolutely nothing. They give me a voucher and send me back to the airport to stay at the hotel there. I check in, get the key to my room, and find out it is a CONFERENCE ROOM. Yes they had me check into a room full of chairs, with a lectern and a projector, with everything set up for the next morning. I go back downstairs and ask for a real room. The woman at the counter starts giving me grief about having a bad attitude (honey I've been running around airports all day with no meal and no room - I have a right to be annoyed). When I eventually get one it is like oh 3 AM or so and I had been in airports all day. Of course I am expected to be bright and chipper at 8:30 AM the next morning.

I've found on business travel that the snootier hotels are more likely to jerk you around than your basic business traveler hotel. Given me an honest humble Courtyard by Marriot over a Westin any day!

[KitchenWitch]

9. any and all hotel horror stories are welcome

[JimmyJazz]

2. I once lived in a hotel for six months during a trial.

It was a nice hotel, but room service got a little boring after a while - so one day I called down and said, "this is JJ in 1512, can you make me something off the menu - please??????" They did.

[Nye Bevan]

3. Worst room service breakfast experience....

Mitre Hotel, Hampton Court, London.

I ordered cereal for breakfast. Instead of sending up a bowl of cereal and a separate jug of milk, they poured the milk on the cereal BEFORE sending it up to my room! Needless to say the cereal was an unrecognizable soggy bowl of mush by the time it arrived!

[grannylib]

4. Mine is not so much the motel itself, it was just waking up there with

someone I'd never seen before in my LIFE (after "winning" a bet with the bartender that I couldn't get through 6 shots of takillya and 6 beers and still be standing. We lost count at 11. Of each.)
I have not touched a drop of tequila to this day; the thought of the SMELL of the stuff makes me want to retch.
Poster child for campaign against underage drinking, sheesh...

[CanuckAmok]

5. Once...

I was staying in this hotel with my wife and her young son. It was a really nice place, but this blood kept pouring from the elevators.

Anyway, that would have been fine on its own, but I met this hot naked woman taking a bath, but when I started making out with her, it turned out she was a withered old corpse.

Oh, and the bartender? Get this: he was a real ghost. Imagine how hard it was getting a drink in a lounge where the bartender's hands were too ectoplasmic to actually grasp the bottles!

Never again will I stray from Motel 6!

[peekaloo]

14. Shush Lad! Do ya want to get us sooood?

[CanuckAmok]

17. "Go crazy?" "Don't mind if I do!!!"

[texas1928]

19. HEEEEERRRREEEEEEEEEE'S.....

JOHNNY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[yardwork]

6. Ok, mine involves crickets

Thousands of those little tan crickets.

I had been to a community development meeting in an isolated rural area and the meeting ran late. It was after midnight and I didn't feel like driving home and I'd neglected to make motel reservations, so I stopped at a little mom and pop motel that had a vacancy sign. The owners were watching TV and they said sure hon we've got a room for you.

Trouble is - the room was entirely full of crickets. Zillions of crickets hopping everywhere. I was so tired I took the room and went right to sleep. I suppose the crickets hopped all over me all night long. I really didn't care.

[bettyellen]

7. happier story... i was showering in a room in mexico and looked up.......

(there was a window really high in the corner) and i saw three pair of eyes shining in the dark. and then they all ran off. it looked just like a cartoon. the staff there was very nice to me for the rest of my trip.

[Spider Jerusalem]

8. Hopefully this isn't going to get the thread locked...

but I was once in a motel with my inamorata at the time, and we discovered that we were being observed through an opening in the curtains whilst in flagrante...owing to our, erm, position, he had a good view of her, but not of me. I sat up, and as soon as he saw me, he ran...only to call our room (breathing very heavily) a few minutes later.

Definitely the creepiest experience I've had in a hotel/motel...

[NNadir]

10. My name is rather common.

A hotel clerk in an major expensive hotel chain gave me a key to "my" room that turned out to be the room of a fellow who shares my name.

I walked on him and his wife (or girlfriend?) making love. It was pretty embarrassing.

No, I didn't stop to chat about it with the guy and the woman. I left as quickly as I could. It could have happened the other way around and I would have appreciated the other fellow leaving.

[CO Liberal]

11. Eastern Oklahoma, April 1994

The Princess and I were moving west from NJ to Nevada. One of her cousins was traveling with us. We decided that we would find a motel once we crossed the line into Oklahoma.

Unfortunately, there had been major floding there the week before, and all the motels were closed. So The Princess got out our AAA Tour Guide and we found a 2-star motel about 30 miles down the road.

It turned out to be an old "tourist cabin" type of motel, that must have been built back in the '40s. But we had no choice, so we booked two rooms - one for her cousin, and one for us.

Our room was loaded with bugs. Bugs in the bathroom, bugs in the bedding, bugs everywhere we looked. We swept the bugs out of the bed, and tried to get some sleep.

The next morning, The Princess's cousin called us from her room. When the sun came up, she could see that her room had a bullet hole in the window. From the inside.....

[XanaDUer]

12. One night in the late 1980s

my then-boyfriend and I were returning back from a great road trip vacation we had taken.

It was sort of late, and we pulled into a motel in Sarasota , FL. We should have known, since a sleazy strip club was a few doors down, but it was late and we were tired.

So, we get into the scuzzy room, and there is what appears to be dried blood splattered on the tacky, wallpapered, dirty walls. The door did not lock well, and we could hear fights in the hallways.

Then we got paranoid and wondered if they had put us into the room on purpose to bust in and kill us or something.

It was horrible. Neither one of us slept that night, and we took off at first light.

[texas1928]

13. Well the managers name was Norman.

And I think it started with a B. I am not for sure now. But there was a lot of screaming from one room while the shower was running. Not for sure what that was. Oh and everything was black and white. And the chubby British guy kept yelling cut.

[Swede]

15. I got locked out of my room and I was only wearing briefs.

After a night of partying at a wedding I went to the hotel to crash. Woke up deadly thirsty and went to get a coke down the hall in a haze. Of course the door locked behind me.

[Jilly Beans]

16. LOL!

I was about to post a link to my thread. :)

[davsand]

18. Pubic hairs on the sheets and lipstick on the glass--WITH the paper cover.

The black underwear at the foot of the unmade bed was a nice touch too...

We "checked out" as soon as we could drag our luggage back down to the desk.

Now, on a funny note, hubby and I went to New Orleans on our honeymoon. We decided we wanted to see the rest of the state, so we headed out into the bayou country. Beautiful day--lovely stuff to see with honest to gosh French/Zydeco songs on the car radio.

We decided to go ahead and find a motel for the night and found one of those old fashioned ones that was little cabins. The office was a guy standing in his living room ironing--an absolute sweetie and extremely nice--but definitely a new experience for us both.

The cabin was clean, and functional. It was nothing elegant, but it was a bed and a bathroom. (Besides, we were NEWLYWEDS--who CARES about the decor--right?)

Bedtime rolls around and hubby jumps in bed. He rolls to the center of the bed. I get in bed and I roll into the center of the bed. Neither of us could move because the center of the bed is like a canyon...

Worst bed I have ever not slept in.


Laura

[KitchenWitch]

20. My horror story is as follows

Last October we went to Disney World for vacation and for 6 nights we had a beautiful room on the Disney property. The room was clean, the service was top notch, we could not have been more pleased.

For the 7th night, we stayed at a motel very close to the airport because we had a flight leaving Orlando at 5:50 AM. This was fairly soon after the hurricanes so a lot of the signage was still missing. We drove by the motel 4 times before we realized where it was. One of the buildings had apparently had a fire and was all crumbly so it was closed. We checked into the motel, and were going to turn in our rental car and ride the shuttle back. They told us at check in that it would cost $7 since we weren't just arriving from the airport. Well, Mr KW took the rental car back, and had packed his suitcase in the car, so he could act like he was just arriving from the airport for the shuttle. It took him 2-1/2 hours to get back, even though the airport was less than 5 minutes from the motel.

It gets "better". We got to our room and it was nasty. Broken fixtures, stains on the bedspreads and carpet, etc. Had there been vacancies elsewhere we would have checked out and gone there. It seemed like a place that rented rooms by the hour if you know what I mean.

There were some rowdy men in the rooms on either side of ours, and while Mr KW was gone, I was huddled in the room with my 14 year old son and 3 year old daughter, with the deadbolt locked, and if anyone had knocked, I would have yelled "Hold on, I am in the middle of cleaning my gun!"

When Mr KW came back, I guess there were hookers outside the building looking for business. My daughter got sick and spiked a temp of 103* so hubby went back out to get some ibuprofen elixer for her.

We took all the bedding off our beds and just slept in the sheets. Mr KW and I did not sleep at all.

[Technowitch]

21. Staying in Vegas, just a couple months ago...

...at one of those major hotels that once upon a time had been famous. Signs all over the place talking about the famous people who'd stayed there once upon a time -- including the Beatles, long ago. (If you've ever been there, you know the one.)

We got to the room, and it looked okay. Only for the first time in decades where I've stayed in a hotel or motel anywhere, there was no coffee maker.

Yeah, if you wanted hot water for tea, you were expected to order room service. Or pay $3 for a cup in their coffee shop.

But wait, it gets better.

The next day, we were awakened by this horrible grinding-rumbling noise. It would go for about a minute, then quit. Then start again. And quit. Over and over.

My spouse went off for some business meetings. So I figured I'd stay behind and get some writing done. Only the noise kept going on and on. I figured I'd get some ice, for some ice water, but the ice machines were broken/non-functional. I tried to order room service, but they said it'd be a 2 hour wait minimum.

Finally I went downstairs to complain about this nonsense -- and management apologized to say, "We're sorry, but the water main has been out." So I asked when it'd be done, and they had no idea.

Finally, I blew my stack. "No coffee-makers in the rooms. Ridiculously overpriced beverages elsewhere. No ice machine. Can't get room service. This insufferable noise, with no end in sight. You folks aren't real big on repeat customers, are you?"

They did finally give me a new room in another of their towers. Ice machine on that floor didn't work either, but at least I found one on another that did. As for hot water, I now own a hot-pot, which lives in my luggage. But we'll never stay there again.