What's the cheapest hotel you ever stayed at? Did it suck?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Gdansk, Poland, $2.00 US/night. Moth-eaten blankets, communal showers, curfew, and surly workers.

Krakow, Poland, $3.00/night. Window had a giant chink between glass and sill that we had to stuff with plastic. I do not recommend visiting Krakow in mid-February.

Warsaw, Poland, $20/night. Pillow had a giant greasy spot from the last occupant’s hair right in the middle, sheets reeked of cigarette smoke so bad I almost puked. I slept on the floor, using my backpack as a pillow. Nice showers.

Trutnov*, Czech Republic, $40/night ($20.00/person). A friend and I went mountain-climbing in the Krkonose mountains in November, well-past tourist season. We knocked on the door of everyone who had “rooms for rent” signs up along the highway, finally hitchhiked to a bigger town and found this exorbitantly-priced hotel. The next day we went to look at these really cool rock formations in the next town and missed the last bus back to Prague (where we lived), and we didn’t feel like paying for the hotel, so we spent the next night drinking our way through every bar in this tiny little town until they kicked us out and we finally passed out on the benches in the bus station.

International Youth Hotel, Salzburg, Austria - $15.00/night
You check in at the bar, you check out at the bar, you eat all meals at the bar, you get your towels at the bar…AMAZING people watching, I think I met the entire 20-something population of Australia during a 4-day stay.

I’ve stayed at this pensione in Budapest a few times, where the price ranged from $8.00/night in 1994 to $20/night last time I was there in '99. Really cute place, clean, close to everything, nice owners, BEST breakfast. I could find it now with my eyes closed.

Lake Baikal, Hungary - $6.00/night for my own cabin on the lake.

Kosnice, Slovakia - $25.00/night for the nicest hotel in town.
*hugs to anyone who has seen that Jim Jarmusch film.

22

Yes, I did mean Australia, not Austria on purpose - their entire youth population is backpacking through Europe at any given time.

23

Easy - the Shamrock Motel in Kitchener, Ontario. $20/night. Canadian. I was in town for a friend’s wedding back in the summer of 1996. When I told everyone where I was saying, those who knew the town anyways, laughed openly while pointing.

Quite the dive… I was driving by it about 2 months ago. Out of busines…

24

I used to stay at the Motel-6 in Sunnyvale CA when I came on business trips. $6 in those days (hence the name). No phone, no pool, no pets, just like the Roger Miller song “King of the Road”.

But the worst was a truckstop in the middle of Nevada, where I stopped on a family cross-country trip. There was a convention that had sucked up all the rooms for 100 miles.
The four of us with one bed (kids on blankets on the floor). Not a single other piece of furniture in the room, bare bulb swinging from the ceiling. The “bathroom” had no door, much less shower or mirror. Just a toilet and cold water sink.
And it came complete with 3 trucks warming up from 5am to 7am, when we finally escaped.

25

Hubby and I decided we wanted some quality time sans baby, so we got his parents to keep our daughter while we took a weekend to ourselves. We wanted a room on the beach away from the tourist crowds. Feeling adventurous, we took the last room at a motel that faced the ocean (I don’t remember the name or the town - I’ve blanked them out)
It was definitely cheap - around $20 - because we were new parents and broke. There was barely room for a double bed and the bathroom was tiny and so-so for cleanliness.
He awoke the next morning facing the wall - and right there before his eyes was a big ol’ booger stuck and dried on the wallpaper.
We laughed ourselves silly, then packed and left. Ah, memories…

26

We stayed at a MicroTel in KY on a trip back home to see my family. It was clean, and nice, but small. VERY small. Then it was me, Saint Zero, and our 11 month old son, and I was massively pregnant with our daughter. Queen size bed, and we BARELY had room for a crib. Now that we have two kids, we can’t possibly stay there. But it was cute. And it was $49 for the night.

27

To back up my lovely wife’s recollection. It was Small. when they say Microtel, don’t doubt them. :smiley: On the other hand, it wasn’t more than 3 steps to the bathroom.

Oh, our first room at the Raddison in New Orleans. That sucked. Small and no Air. Not Cool for two adults and toddlers. So they gave us a junior suite. Very nice looking, except for the small problem of those toddlers. They don’t sleep on pull out couches well. All four of us ended up in the king size bed, and two toddlers can take up more space than a whale. I ended up in a corner, after calling downstairs 8 times vainly in search of a crib.

That sucked.

28

I have stayed at the Super 8 in Steamboat Springs, Colorado several times, the cheapest place in town during my sales rep days.

Not too bad really, out on the outskirts of town. I don’t recall how much a night it was there but it was clean and friendly people at the desk.

I have also stayed at a more expensive places in Steamboat but the only place that allows dogs when I had to take my dog on sales trips, can’t remember the name of it, it was “nicer” than the Super 8 since it had a decent bar but overall the experience (outside of having a bar) it was not any better.

29

Cheapest I’ve ever stayed at was a Bed and Breakfast in L’Anse Amour, Labrador. $36.00 Canadian for the night, which probably worked out to approximately $25.00 American (this was in July 1998). It was very nice.

Cheapest regular hotel (not B&B) was in El Paso. Don’t recall the exact price or name, but it was just off exit 16 on the I-10. It had the softest beds I’ve ever slept in in my life. It was fantastic.

That’s not to say I haven’t had a few disasters in cheap motels. There was one in Deming, NM which had a serious bug problem, for example. But overall, my experiences with cheap hotels have been positive.

30

Well, if we are counting “youth hostels” as well as regular motels, you can regularly find rooms for $5 a night (or at least you could in 1993, when I stayed in many such hostels in Switzerland, Italy, Austria and Germany).

31

Last summer, lake of the Ozarks, $25/night. 2 queen beds, clean bathroom. Cable TV. Very nice.

–Tim

32

“The Tourist Hotel” Abu Kamel , Eastern Syria. $5 a night about four years ago. I think I was the only person who had stayed there in months. There was a room. The window had glass in it. No TV, no bath, toilet worked. No hot water. Free breakfast in the morning - and there was even a telephone (just the one) at reception. Absolutely perfect.

33

I stayed in a $22/night motel room in Albany, NY. It was perfectly okay for a night’s rest.

What struck me as funny though is that each room was really just a little “fuck shed”. Open the door, and the ONLY thing there, filling the entire room, is the small double bed.

And back in my bad old days I frequented some hourly-rate downtown hotels, where sleeping wasn’t the point, but scoring was, in more ways then one.

34

£4 a night on Ko Samet in Thailand. Paradise beach 2 min. walk away. Great restaurants 5 min. walk away.
Had to live with a room that had no power from 9am - 6pm. Free bugs running around. To get to the beach you had to walk through the efluant(sp?) from the toilets and a couple of very wild dogs. All that didn’t matter.

It was great and I can’t wait to go back.

35

Back in 1997 I spent a night in one of those famous “capsule hotels” in Tokyo. I was quite surprised at how comfortable it was. The bed was very soft (the capsule was about 2m x 1m x 1m), and there was a TV, radio and reading lamp inside my compartment. You could also order pay-per-view videos. It was about $40/night, and I wouldn’t hesitate to go there again.

–sublight.

36

Spring Break, 1986, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Overrun, cockroach infested hole in the wall “2 family” house. The linoleum was ripped all over the place, the mattresses were older than Lincoln and it smelled like insecticide. I can’t complain, though, because we stuffed 18 people in 2 rooms with 4 beds. Which worked out rather well, actually, because 1/3 of us slept all night, 1/3 slept all day, and 1/3 never slept at all.

Besides, it only cost us $5.55 each a night! Well, that plus the extra $200 ($16.67 a person!) the owners assessed after Steve dropped the toilet as he was moving it onto the front lawn.

37

I have two memories of bad hotel rooms. The first was on the island of Zakynthos, in Greece. I was 20 years old and travelling on a very tight budget. I found a place my first night on the island for 1000 drachmas (about $6 at the time) that was really nice - small room, but clean, view of the ocean, and my own bathroom! The only problem was that I was kicked out after the first night. In Greece, it’s not uncommon for hotel owners to send people to meet the ferries and talk tourists into coming to their hotels. I think the guy I talked to sold me the room too cheaply, because even as I was checking in, I was told I had to leave the next day.

So I found another place, for about twice as much money. I really needed to keep it cheap, so I took a room in a pretty slimey place. The room was dark, and the window opened up to a brick wall. The bathroom was down the hall, and there was an old, scarey looking guy in the room across from the bathroom. Everytime I used it, he’d try to get me to come into his room by offering me food. Yikes! After about two nights, I got out of that room.

The other worst hotel room story story was at the Colorado Hotel in Glenwood Springs, CO. SO and I had taken the train from Denver to Glenwood Springs, and I surprised him by booking a suite. I think I paid about $175. The lobby of the Colorado Hotel was beautiful. Very nice old hotel, redone in period style. As you went up, though, things got progressively worse. The suite was on the top floor, and by the time you got there, the wallpaper was torn off the walls, the carpeting looked ancient, and the decor was nonexistant. Our suite was OK. Antique bed, tiny bathroom, small sitting room. Nice view, though. Everything was OK until we went to bed at around 11:30. The room had a radiator, and the thing started knocking every few seconds. It got louder, and louder. We couldn’t sleep. SO gets up, and starts fiddling with the radiator to see if he can turn it down, or off, or anything. The controls were stuck, and after fiddling with it for a while, he got a good grip on it and tried to turn it. The whole thing came off in his hand, and the radiator started spewing burning hot steam into the room! Shit!

We got dressed, and went down to the lobby. The night staff were on duty, and were not impressed with our story. They told us that the maintenance guy was gone, and there was nothing they could do. We had to push some to get them to accept that it was impossible to stay in the room overnight. At that point, the woman behind the desk offered us another room for $140 a night (they had no other open suites.) I was furious - having to get up and move to another room at midnight was NOT acceptable. She hemmed and hawed, and told me she could drop the price to $120. At that point I gave up, and we moved rooms. In the morning, I talked to the manager, and we ended up getting the room for free. What a hassle, especially in what was supposed to be a high end hotel! I’ll never stay there again.

38

On the ride down to Florida, I once chanced a hindu-owned establishment-this place was so far gone that the rats moved out! Room-musty,furniture dated from the mid-1950’s. Bed-lumpy-sheets marginal. Bathroom-one 20 watt bulb, rusty plumbing. No hot water tap on sink-loud groaning sounds when shower turned on.
Carpet-worn and dirty. Continental “breakfast”-lukewarm coffe, stale doughnuts.
Avoid HIOA at all costs!

39

Ko Samui, island off the east coast of Thailand.

Bungalow without an attached bath, bed, mosquito net, porch, hammock. $1.30 per night. And there were two of us!

Usually we held out for an attached bath/shower. But this place was right on the ocean, ten meters to the South China Sea.

It was in a place called Coral Cove, the snorkelling was exceptional, the water chrystal clear, the reef unbelievable.

I remember spending an entire afternoon lying half in the ocean, half on the beach, until a fellow came by and sold us home made coconut ice cream on a stick. It was the yummiest.

40

Bangkok, Kaosan (sp?) Rd.
US$3/night for a double room (as many people as you could cram in) with air conditioning.
A room with no AC went for about $1.20.
Yes, the “bathroom” was down the hall.

My (female) friend & I thought it would be OK - sheets looked reasonably clean, the door had a good lock - until we saw the blood on the walls!!! from all the squished mosquitoes. In a country with malaria, NOT something you want to see. So yes, it sucked, literally and figuratively.

Shortly thereafter, we found another hotel in a different part of town, that was clean, had a restaurant, AC, etc. (a business traveler hotel) for $30/night. Definitely worth the extra $$

Traveling throughout asia - China (Beijing, Shanghai, interior), HK (pre-unification), Thailand, India - we averaged less than $15/night/person staying in decent, safe places, including the occasional big-city splurge. No complaints!