In 1988, while living in Laredo TX, I took an overnight trip to San Antonio with some co-workers. We none of us had much money, but one married couple said they knew a cheap motel where we could stay. The doors didn’t even have locks. They had those little hook-and-eye things like you use to hold a screen door closed. No sheets, guess they were an extra-cost option I hadn’t requested. It was a sketchy neighborhood and there was a lot of loud activity all night. I didn’t sleep, anyway. I sat up in a chair with a bowie knife handy until dawn. Don’t know that one could really have legitimately expected more for $5, though.
Hotel Brianza, Milan, 2003.
There were definitely people living in the hotel, which I am not necessarily averse to, but when we checked in and walked to our room there were dozens of people hanging out in the hall ways, sitting on folding chairs, with their TVs on in their rooms, talking to each other and smoking. Oh dear god the smoke.
We slept on top of the covers, in our clothes, because the sheets were awful - maybe dirty, maybe just stained, we couldn’t tell.
The other occupants of the hotel seemed to spend the whole night awake and smoking. There was a steady stream of cigarette smoke coming under the door into our room, so we kept the window ajar to get at least a smidgen of fresh air. But with the window open we were kepts awake all night by the passing trams. The trams turned a corner right by our window and the electric arcs as they rounded the corner would light up our room like realy bright lightning and the wires would make a big crackle noise and thrumming noise as the trams passed our window. Horrible horrible.
We had to be up really early the next morning to get the bus to the airport and we couldn’t find anyone to pay. We finally found the night clerk sleeping in the dining room and paid him. We wanted to pay when we checked in but they refused to let us for some reason.
Bayside Inn, Monterey California. There was a big event that weekend and we were scrounging for a room, the website looked OK, so we booked. When we got there it was prepay for 3 days since there wasn’t another room in town. Around $600 as I recall, and it was made clear to me that there were no refunds.
The room had obviously been carved out of another room, or something. Drywall for 2 walls, no paint. The closet doors and hanging rod were gone, a cheap assed TV was shoved in there on boxes. The only power in the room other than the bathroom, was a power strip under the bed. So if you moved, the power flickered or went out. The bedding was awful, horrifying.
The lock on the door was a joke, a stiff breeze would open the door. The bathroom was just horrendous. The ice machine stole my $$ (yes, you had to put $$ in) and I complained and they shrugged. The “breakfast” was a toaster and some boxes of Eggos. We didn’t partake.
I hear they have new management, but I wonder to this day if there is no fire Marshall in Monterey or if he’s on the pad.
The worst wasn’t all that horrible. It was a budget hotel in Hazelton, PA. We were driving back after we left our daughter off at college and used one of those coupons. It offered a continental breakfast.
The place was definitely cheap and the beds felt like the mattress was made of cardboard. The towels and blankets were thin, and the amenities were a single bar of soap. The continental breakfast was a box of donuts.
But the room was clean and looked like it had been redone recently. And for $20 (in 2003), you didn’t expect the Ritz.
Not anything as bad as any of these, but back in the mid-90’s I went on a training trip to Boston and wrangled some vacation and a company-paid car into the trip. Coming back, I stopped at some on-the-freeway hotel in Worcester. First clue should have been that the parking lot was surrounded by a 12’ chain link fence.
Less than an hour after I got in my room, about two doors down the hall and on the other side, this drug dealer and his bodyguards took up residence. The evening was a steady stream of customers down the hall, interacting with the rather large man standing outside the door and standing there talking while waiting for their turns. I was afraid to go out to look for food in case there was trouble of any kind, or that my room would be ransacked while I was out.
My mom, best friend and I stayed there for one night in February, 1988, while visiting a college nearby. We were supposed to stay a second night, but it was bad enough that my sleep deprived (best friend and I snored, oops) mother drove us home in a snowstorm to avoid sleeping in that room again. We chose another college, and I think part of the reason why is that we were so grouchy about that room we couldn’t assess the campus properly during our visit.
Another was in the summer of 1997. I drove to Cleveland for a concert, detouring to pick up a friend at Oberlin College. The show was fine, and my intention was to take the friend back to school and head home to Pittsburgh, but leaving Oberlin I got heinously lost and drove in circles for about an hour and a half and once I was finally heading in the right direction, I lasted about 45 minutes before I found myself drifting over the center line. I found the first motel on the side of the highway and pulled in. I staggered in, kicked off my shoes, dropped my glasses on the nightstand and fell asleep on top of the comforter. When I woke, and swung my feet down onto the carpet beside the bed, it crunched. My shoes were a few steps away and I tiptoed to them, crunch crunch crunch. I needed to use the bathroom, but I decided the state of the floor made me afraid to even look . I ran out, dropped off the key, and took the risk of using the bathroom of a McDonalds a few miles down the road instead. I still don’t know where I was, because it took me another 2.5 hours to get home. Somewhere in the wilds of Ohio.
The Motel 6 in Little Rock, Arkansas.
My best friend and I were road-tripping to San Antonio, she was driving and getting tired, and we missed the exit for the good hotels. Next exit had a Motel 6 - eh, it’s a cheap bed for the night, who cares. So we go in.
Long story short:
I stood in the bathroom perfectly still for something like 5 straight minutes working up the nerve to get ready for bed because the bathroom was so gross. The bathtub was dirty and stained, the shower head was a small rusty metal one from the olden days, there was a huge glob of hair in the drain, and I swear there were bloodstains on the shower curtain.
The sink clogged immediately upon use.
We slept on top of the bedspreads and I think I put my sweater over the pillowcase, if I remember correctly, so I wasn’t touching the linens.
When we left my friend looked back for the final make-sure-we-got-everything and she goes “Did you throw your socks in the garbage?!” Yes I did.
Ever since then when my husband and I are roadtripping and we stop for the night, I don’t care how sketchville the place is - it’s still “…better than the Motel 6 in Little Rock.”
When I lived in Tucson, I went to Phoenix one night for a Dopefest. I stayed the night in a hotel so I wouldn’t have to drive home that night- it was either a Motel 6 or a Super8. The room above mine was partying and making a lot of noise well after midnight, and I called the front desk to complain. They called the room and told them that there had been a complaint, and which room complained. The occupants came down and banged on my door and threatened me. That was probably the worst hotel experience I’ve ever had, though I’ve stayed in my share of seedy hotels with roaches and crackheads all around.
The weirdest hotel experience I’ve ever had- my boyfriend and I checked into a hotel somewhere in California. We settle in and are relaxing and watching tv, and the phone rings. I answer it, and it’s the guy from the front desk, and he says, rather forcefully, “Don’t make a mess!” I’m like, “Uh, okay…” 
A couple of hours later, he calls back and apologizes, and says that he thought we were someone else.
My worst one was one we didn’t stay in.
I was vising my friend that lived in the Valley and about 5 of us wanted to go to Hollywood to check out the nightlife. We figured we’d find some hotel to stay in, no problem (this was pre-internet). Better than driving home late. Anyway, we picked one that looked acceptable, and my friend went in to get us a room. Before he had barely left the car, a bunch of sketchy looking ladies came up to the car - and told us we had to leave! They were insistent that we had to go - NOW!
I’d expect sketchy women to maybe offer their services, maybe even try to sell us drugs, but nope, they wanted us gone, and pronto. I think even someone yelled from the window. I kept trying to tell them that we couldn’t go until our driver came back, but that wasn’t good enough. Totally weird situation.
Could never figure out what the deal was. My theory is they were undercover cops, running some operation and they wanted the civilians gone. Because otherwise why weren’t they trying to either rob us or sell us something?
I’m not sure if these count because they were so scary, I didn’t stay in either. The first was on my way out of West Texas. I was driving from Austin, Texas to San Diego, CA in 1998 and thought it might be a good idea to avoid staying in a larger border city like El Paso that at the time was known for having high crime and car theft. So I pulled off with my wife in the town of Sierra Blanca, TX instead. The town was entirely boarded up except for a diner, motel, and gas station. Based on the graffiti, it appears the town had become a waste dump for nuclear/toxic waste, which drove away the residents. The motel was, as expected, disgusting looking and we kept on driving to El Paso.
My second disturbing adventure was in 2001 when I was checking out the national parks in Nevada, Arizona, and Utah as part of a last minute trip scheduled after 9/11 because our plane flights got cancelled. I ended up in a small town called Mexican Hat, UT where once again, my wife and I thought about spending the night. We went to a gas station that had a Taco Bell Express inside, which seemed to be the only real business in sight. That was where we encountered what I can only describe as a gang of older Native Americans that almost appeared to be inbred. A one legged Indian who had horrible facial contortions followed us into the store on his crutches and never spoke, but kept, walking up to us and staring at us without talking. We assumed he was a beggar, but he just stared. We decided to get some food from the Taco Bell, which was just a counter, and when the woman who ran the place came out of the back, my wife actually gasped. She literally looked the character of ‘Chet’ from ‘Weird Science’ after he had been turned into the toad monster. We ordered our food, but questioned whether it would be safe to eat. Needless to say, once we got the food, we quickly ran around the weird Indian guy and got the hell out of there, staying in Page, AZ instead about an hour down the road.
Dude. Just because they’re ugly, poor, and Native American doesn’t mean their food isn’t safe to eat. That seems a little bigoted, frankly.
Well, hard to tell. I suppose it would depend on how one looks at it, no? Worst hotel/lodging, period. Or worse according to a price/value metric?
In any case I don’t recall being on a hotel, guesthouse or not that I would say “never again”, and I’ve been in some really crummy places.
There was this place in Southern Thailand, bamboo cabins, floating bamboo cabins on a lake. Sleeping there was… interesting.
Between the constant creaking of the structure that reminded one that it was 30 meters to the bottom, the dirty old mattress simply laying on the floor, the fish jumping and splashing just 30 centimeters bellow (could see the water through the gaps on the floor), ants crawling everywhere, a gecko serenading somewhere on the ceiling (probably feasting on the cloud of mosquitoes hovering inside) and a mouse that kept running laps around the mattress all night it was a rather restless night.
Which wasn’t all that bad since I gave up on the idea of sleeping around 4:30 AM and was rewarded with one of the most beautiful sunrises I’ve ever seen; mist slowly pouring over the jungle covered steep mountains around the perfectly still lake, sun rays bursting over the tops and slowly coming down like searchlights to light up the scenery. Just gorgeous.
So, objectively, that place was bad, but still well worth staying there and I wouldn’t mind going back.
On the other hand there are other types of crumminess I’m less tolerant of, like that hotel in Manila… decent room but waiting for the elevator next to a forty something with a sixteen (if that) girl made my skin crawl. Come to think of it, yeah, that one, never again.
I am actually going to advertise for a bad hotel- I’ve certainly stayed in worse, but this one is by far the greatest decrease to other hotels within 100 yds of it. The Waikiki Prince hotel is 100 yds off of Waikiki Beach, you can actually walk through the Hyatt to get there. It is 1/10th the price of the Hyatt and 100x the sketchiness. We saw more drug use in one week there than in 10 years in NYC and Chicago, the rooms aren’t cleaned during your stay, the AC was worthless, but I can guarantee you will enjoy your stay and go back again if only for the smugness you get for the cheaper rate you are getting than the Hyatt guests. Parking is free (if they have a spot) whereas the parking anywhere else in the neighborhood costs nearly as much as hotel itself, but you can take the public bus from the airport or just jump in one of the shuttles for the expensive hotels.
Just to pick on Yarster a bit more, that second story didn’t even involve a hotel! Please take your “unsettling encounters with people of a different race who may have had some facial deformity” stories elsewhere.
In Costa Rica back in 1996 I stayed in a place on the beach that was $5 a night. The door wouldn’t shut big sand crabs ran all over the floor in the room. But it was an adventure and I remember laughing about it at the time.
I started a thread much like this in 2003, with this story:
Mine was in Utah, too, in a small town near the Colorado border. (Vernal) It really wasn’t that bad, but there was an odor to it I couldn’t quite identify. There was an oil and gas boom going on at the time and the parking lot was full of work trucks of various descriptions. I got in about 9PM, and went to sleep not long afterwards. At about 3AM, every truck in the parking lot fired up, making an incredible din. The entire place filled up with diesel fumes. At about 4, just as I fell back to sleep, the whole thing repeated itself. I guess there was a shift change at the oilfield - these trucks were coming in.
Then the guys proceeded to smoke and drink (hard to do in Utah with the weak beer and the near impossible to find state run liquor stores) and carouse until 7:30, which was when I had to get up for work. I didn’t sleep at all those 3.5 hours. Luckily I was only there that one night, but I had to work all day and drive home over the Colorado mountains in a near catatonic state.
It wasn’t third world bad, but we stayed at a place in rural North Jersey that was pretty sleazy. The foam in the mattress was disintegrating. There weren’t any wet bodily fluid stains, but some hadn’t been laundered. We stayed at a place in East brunswick, NJ that was just bad because a guy was cheating on his wife next door. Yes, the walls were thin enough to hear every word. There were no more rooms, and we had our 18 month old with us. No sleep at all.
Many years ago, I had a job that required a lot of travel, and there was one place that put me up in a mom & pop motel in the small town where I was working. Nothing wrong with the motel, except one night when I was trying to fall asleep and I thought I heard this going on in the next room. I turned on the TV so I wouldn’t have to listen to it, and found out that whoever was next door was watching HBO. 
:smack:
My own worst experience was at a town in Oklahoma that was hit by a tornado a few years later. Probably improved the place, too. :rolleyes: Among other things, there was dried-up excrement all over the bottom of the toilet seat. Gross!
nm