Budget Host, Bangor ME. We held a reservation by credit card and arrived late to find they ALMOST gave our room away to the guy in front of us! We heard the desk clerk said it was the last room available, and he didn’t know if “they’d” show. I can’t recall all now, but it was obvious it was OUR room! Also, the hotel was nothing but pre-fab trailers slapped together into a somewhat presentable building. Last, the sink greeted you when you opened the door to the room. It was one of those deals where the sink was separate from the bathroom, but still…everything about the place was “cheap”. Not that I need the Taj, mind ya, but…! Luckily, we saw no bugs, so it could always be worse, but… - Jinx
Wow… just drove by it on Sunday (4/14/08) and teased my buddies in Lawrence about what a classy joint their town had in the Jayhawk Motel.
Based on what it looked like from the outside, your story doesn’t surprise me at all.
Seedy does not necessarily entail bad. I’ve stayed at quite a few seedy hotels that were still good deals. Except for the real five-star places, most hotels in Thailand will have a few rooms set aside for Short Time liaisons. There’s a place in Beijing we like to stay, the Fangyuan Hotel. Peeling wallpaper, grotty bathroom, the carpets in the hallways could do with a wash, but the location is perfect. And despite its rundown look, it’s reasonably clean, and we’ve never ever seen a bug there.
The Economy Motor Lodge in New Orleans. Twenty of my med school buddies and other assorted cronies stayed there during New Years Eve 2000. $55/night, even on NYE, plenty of vacancy, but we were still so collectively broke that we stayed five to a room. It’s walking distance to the French Quarter, though it probably isn’t a good idea.
We had two towels for each room, if by “towel” you mean “glorified dishrag with the texture of 20-grit finishing paper”. We called and asked if we could have some more of them; “No,” they replied.
Drug deals were happening pretty openly within sight of the room.
When we awoke on 1.1.2000, we found that none of our keycards worked. We were told it was due to the Y2K problem. That’s right, we were in the only place in the universe affected by Y2K.
A few months later, some friends and I were doing a spring break tour of the South and found ourselves in NO during a huge convention of some sort. There were no hotel rooms to be found anywhere. “Oh, I know of one,” I said. It was just as scary as I remembered. This led to our suggested slogan for the place–“There’s always the Economy Motor Lodge.”
I was watching 60 Minutes sometime after Katrina, and they showed a boat going down Tulane Avenue, going right by the EML. I felt bad, because I’m sure I said at some point that it needed a river diverted through it. Probably did it some good, though.
Hee hee. 
I forgot to mention, they were that really fluffy kind, where there’s like three sheets per roll. Also, not to be gross, I do suffer from a chronic intestinal illness and need the bathroom more than most people do.
The main problem was that no one who worked there knew enough English to understand “toilet paper.”
Troy, Montana. I got my room key from a 10 year-old kid working the desk. When I pulled up in front of my room a bunch of teenagers peeked out of the windows of the room next door to see if I was their meth dealer. There were dirty kleenex on the floor, cigarette butts in the toilet and the comforter on the bed was an old sleeping bag, unzipped.
I put the key on the night stand and drove for an hour to find a good motel.
My workmates and I travel all over Montana and trade bad hotel stories (and warnings.) There was the hotel in Baker where the heater only worked on high. In January, I had to turn the heater on, fall asleep, wake up burning, turn the heater off, open the window, fall asleep, wake up freezing, turn the heater on, fall asleep. Repeat. Another hotel in Glasgow had a gas wall heater that would shake the room when it turned on. Someone else had a room with a crack below the door that was so big they woke up to find a three-inch high snowdrift INSIDE the door.
Zeldar, that place in Sturbridge was actually rated three stars (or diamonds) by AAA. But one of the things that pissed me off most was that I was handicapped at the time and asked for handicpapped accessible. The doorsill was so far from the ground that I had to sit down on it as if it were a chair and then swing my legs into the room.
Another bad placed that I stayed was in the 1970s. But it was memorable. It was the Dundee Inn in Virginia Beach. We had to pay up front. That should have been a clue. The furniture in the room looked like it had been retrieved from a junk pile or salvage store. There was sand in the bathroom. On those rare occasions when the air conditioner worked, the room smelled like long-dead fish. Most of the time the electricity would blow when the person in the next room would turn on a hair dryer or any other 20th Century appliance. It was awful.
The Rai View Hotel on Yap, a tiny island in the Federated States of Micronesia in the western Caroline Islands, was (is?) famous for its bleakness among Pacific travellers. When our turn came to stay there in 1988, I could hardly wait.
I’m happy to say it matched its reputation. Two iron cots shoved against the wall with a threadbare sheet on each, a paper-thin towel, a fungally diverse shower stall with hot and cold running rust, and a gritty linoleum floor.
The best part, though, was the view of the trash mountain out the window, consisting entirely of Budweiser beer cans.
Ah, to be young again.
The Hacienda in Vegas, before they blew it up. I’d flown into Vegas in a private plane, and the weather the night we were supposed to return got bumpy, and our pilot bagged the flight until the next day, which left us in LV during Comdex with no hotel, and the Hacienda was our sudden destination.
That place was the most threadbare, weird hotel stay I’ve had. It pales by far in comparison the other places described here, but it really was weird to stay in what was a major casino that had nearly faded to dust. This place was just huge, and it was all falling apart, except for the slot machines and such in the casino area.
My spouse tells me that The Hacienda was nothing compared with another LV property, “El Rancho”, which was truly seedy, and her cow-orkers dubbed “El Rauncho”
My wife & I have always stuck to the rule: If there are flashing lights, time to move on. One night, on a cross country drive, we ran into the cops/motel three times. I drove another hour along the interstate, before finding a Motel Six.
I’ve never stayed in a hotel that I’d really call “seedy,” i.e. sketchy or obviously a haven for illicit activity of some kind. However, two hostelries spring to mind:
Years ago, when my brother and I were little, my dad drove us on one of his interminable car trips to somewhere - probably to visit our grandparents, I don’t remember what this trip was about. Anyway, by and by he was completely bushed, we were in the middle of northern Ontario, and the first place to stop was some sort of lumber or construction camp. Dad somehow wangled a bedroom for the night that was in some sort of mobile structure. I remember him warning us with great severity that if at any time we had to get up to go to the bathroom, we were absolutely to wake him up and under no circumstances were we to venture out alone. I remember it scared me a little and was the first experience I can remember of realizing that something was sketchy. Actually, he was probably overreacting, but the memory is strong.
Anyway, a few years ago I was in Cádiz and the only place to stay that I could afford was this youth hostel. The price was insanely low - €9/night - the other guests were pretty friendly (we had a great little party on the nearby beach) and the food was okay. But god, the hostel sucked. The lowlights were the improperly plumbed sink in our room that reeked of sewer gas, the door to the bathroom that there was no way to secure and that banged continually because of the open skylight, and the motorcycles that roared all night along the narrow street below. Also, we couldn’t get in our rooms for several hours every afternoon or after a certain hour at night.
(The only worse lodging experience I had in Spain - well, let’s just say, never take a room overlooking the main plaza during the height of the local fiesta. Wasn’t the hotel’s fault, exactly, except to the extent that the innkeeper promised me it would be over by 1 a.m., and it went on until 5. He did willingly put me in another room when I asked, though.)
Once, soon after he moved broke and homeless to Montreal, Hamish spent the night in a sauna. I can’t say that really counts as seedy, because there it’s not a hotel that people are using for humping, it’s a hump house that he was using as a hotel. A friend tells me that he routinely stays in saunas abroad, even though he’s (faithfully) monogamous with his BF, just for the ambiance (and the view).
You guys don’t even know world class dives until you’ve stayed in Indian hostels.
For worst run I’ll have to go with the Days Inn near the Philadelphia airport. Almost every hotel room door had a pile of dishes in front of it. It took us three tries to get a room with clean sheats. We went down to the cafe to get some food and it’s no exageration that everyone working there was on drugs.
I’ve lived in a few SROs. That’s short for Single Room Occupancy, and the establishments thus designated are where poor people live in San Francisco. From five to seven bills a month, plus change. Four walls and a door, a sink and a bed of sorts, shower and shitter down the hall, a window which if you’re lucky doesn’t open onto a ventilation shaft. You get hot and cold running roaches, mice, perhaps rats and maybe even bedbugs.
The upside is, there’s 24/7 free entertainment. Your neighbors are the rest of the urban poor. Drunks and dopeheads and whores and jacketjobs – just folks; I’m one too and I ain’t putting them down. But when the guy that lives right above you is known throughout the hotel as “Hollerin’ Henry” and apparently juggles safes and bowling balls and big marble flowerpots when he’s not cussing out the Boogerman at the top of his mighty lungs, you get an attitude pretty fast.
All of 'em are seemingly run by Gujarati immigrants who appear to hold their tenants in the utmost contempt and forget their English when there’s a leak in your ceiling.
You supply your own toilet paper.
Let me see…I’ve lived in the Arana, the Delta, the Stratford, the St Charles, the Mentone, the Sunrise, the Crystal, the Royan, and, briefly, the Seneca. But the very grotiest was thelast one I lived in, the Baldwin (Bug Bin) House at the corner of 6th and Mission (did I just hear the other San Fran Dopers all gasp in horror simultaneously?) Not only is it a dive, but nothing works two days running; the electric used to go out for hours at a stretch…and the damn place is haunted to boot.
Yes. In fact, I came into this thread specifically to mention it.
If you get one of the higher priced suites, it’s not bad. Go for one of the cheaper rooms and you’ll get plenty of bugs in the bathroom, but you’re lucky to get dry sheets.
Eat elsewhere. The food is inedible. And expensive.
The one motel in San Jon, NM, which I believe was called the San Jon Motel. I was driving from New Orleans to Flagstaff, AZ, and I had driven about 1000 miles that day. I was really tired and it was the first place I ran into.
It cost $16 (in 2001). No phone in the room, a moldy-ass shower, I didn’t even look under the bed sheet. The best part is, my door got stuck. I couldn’t open it from the inside, and since I had no phone to call the front desk, I had to crawl out the (one, high, small) window and drop down on the sidewalk. And the sidewalk was covered in these big, black beetles (not cockroaches, thankfully).
Of course, once I got on the road the next day, I found out that there was about 500 nicer hotels just 15 miles or so down the road.
In the early eighties, my then girlfriend got it into her head in about the middle of December to go to Las Vegas for New Years’ Eve. Plane tickets was no problem but finding a place to stay . . .
After a dozen calls to hotels large and small yielded nothing, I called the Las Vegas Reservations Bureau. They were very polite – didn’t even laugh, and about six hours later they called back with a place to stay for two nights, the Desert Rose Motel.
We got off the plane at McCarran, climbed into a taxi, and wondered how far it would be to the motel. Not far at all, it turned out, on the Strip a couple hundred yards south of The Frontier. It’s not there any more (I don’t think the Frontier is either) and was pretty seedy on that night. Not near as bad as some of the horror stories told here, but pretty well run down and frayed at the corners. After getting the key from an unfriendly clerk at the desk, we went to the room.
First thing that caught our eye was the huge mirror over the bed, which had a black coverlet on it. “Hmmm,” I said, “I’ll just bet–” and snapped on the television. Sure enough, it came up with a couple coupling and bad guitar music.
“I’ve never been in a place like this,” G F said in a small voice.
“Neither have I,” I said, shooting my man of the world reputation to tatters.
The heat was a switch. When it was on it was on (and worked quite well, actually); when it was off, it was off. The bathroom was about as grotty as you might expect and the whole time we were there, the hot water never got above lukewarm, not even in the middle of the day. I pictured this poor, over-worked water heater valiantly doing its best against a never-ending series of showers in that building.
The furniture was worn to the point of springs poking out and there was a lot of grime everywhere but no bugs so I suppose it wasn’t near as bad as it could have been. But it’s the first and only time I stayed in a place where they are surprised you want it all night.