2 nights in a hotel in Sydney. Arrived at about 10pm straight from the airport. Unmanned entry to had to call someone from reception to come and give me the key despite arranging all this in advance.

Got in the room and the AC was broken so as a Brit arriving in Australia for the first time it was unbearably hot and the room stank of damp.

About the worst way to start jetlag recovery and I got out after the first night despite paying in advance.

Jan 1995 I stayed three nights at The Manor House in Aurora, CO.

I was solo and am male, so I doubt the creeper spent much time watching me. Still, damn. It’s hard to place, but I think the Panera across from Children’s Hospital on Colfax is where it sat.

I have a long list of really bad hotels,but some weren’t responsible for their own badness (if you are in an “almost warzone” area priorities shift), some were known to be bad (and didn’t try to look like they weren’t - and were at least priced like that…so I am okay with that).

The worst one therefore would be one with a formerly fairly posh German chain that is now mostly run down. First they didn’t have my room ready. Then when it was ready, the carpet (ugh,I hate old 80ies carpet) felt squishy…and smelled…turns out the toilet leaked into the carpet. Which housekeeping surely would have noticed if they had cleaned the toilet…which still had the shit stains of whoever was in it before me. So I’ve got another room. It wasn’t much cleaner and had twin beds. Not what I ordered but I didn’t care at this point… extra points: There was a hole in the wall behind the closet which woul allow someone to look into the bathroom of another room. Again I didn’t care,especially as the other room seemed not to be occupied. And I was dead tired. (And yes,i always look behind closets, not for holes, but for bugs and cameras…had encounters with both)

Later the same night a hooker knocked on the door. Which is kind of strange as the elevators required key cards and the stairs were “alarm locked”. So she likely worked with someone on the inside. Which is kind of a security problem.

Now, at around 3 o’clock in the morning the door swings open and a very drunk lady walks in with her baggage. She screams I scream, she needs to puke before I can explain. At least she makes it to the toilet. So here I am, holding the hair of a total stranger puking her soul out. (Hey, as an original Oktoberfest trainer paramedic I am a professional at that!) It later turns out they simply gave her the shit stained room an hour after me, when she complained they promised to give her another room by the time she would come back from her stag night. I really would like to tell you know how this was a big love story, but it’s not. After she had a few more bodily functions and I was sure she would be okay I packed my stuff, screamed at the night desk staff a bit after they accused me of bilking the bill and went to the other side of the street into another (big EU chain) hotel. … whose night staffmember looked at me, asked me if I was also a “refugee from that other hotel” and laughed. Told me I was already the fourth one the same night.

Funny enough they really had the audacity to charge my company for the whole stay, even for things they wouldn’t be able to charge if I left after a full day. (Taxes, breakfast,etc., parking) The company lawyer had their fun with them.

I just looked them up and while the chain still operates the hotel has been closed long ago. And funny enough I even found a newspaper article of the staff complaining that “no other hotel would employ them because they knew we were above their level”. Yeah,no.

I’m going to say a Marriott in Manhattan, roughly in August 2007. I forget exactly where, but it was close to the WTC site.

I was on a business trip, and I wasn’t paying for it. The room wasn’t dirty or anything, but its just felt delapidated. There was wallpaper peeling in a couple of spots.

It certainly wasn’t horrible, but I just remember thinking about the fact that this just-adequate room in a major chain hotel was costing five hundred dollars a night.

I shudder to think what it would cost now.

There was one in Athens, Greece where I shoved furniture up against the door because I was sure I was going to be robbed or worse in the middle of the night. However, the worst was probably this “hotel” in Ensenada, Mexico where there was no way I was going to sleep in the bed, not going into detail there. There was a hole in the drywall where it looked like somebody got slammed into it and blood all over the bathroom (horror movie levels). I don’t think I stayed in the room and just went out drinking all night.

Was on a road trip to South Dakota with my (now) wife’s family, and her father had just planned on stopping wherever on the trip rather than planning stops (which is probably better considering there were 3 adults taking care of 5 kids from 8 to 16 and we were an…interesting set (all ADHD, most with (un)diagnosed autism). We stopped at some motel 8 style place kinda late and just wanted to get some sleep so we could get on the road and to our cabin destination. We ended up having to stay there, but it sketch as all hell.

Man, those rooms were awful. The room was musty AF, and I remember not taking my shoes off because the carpet felt spongy. The beds were rock hard and the sheets under the duvet were polka dot look white sheets. I didn’t even undress and made sure to change my clothes before getting back in the van the next day.

Other than that, it was a lovely trip. It even led to a moment that my wife will never be able to live down with her family, and still comes up pretty regularly when we talk to her family.

One time we stayed at a motel 6 in San Diego to visit a family member. The motel allowed pets and we had a dog and cat.

Turns out crack heads in the parking lot had to start the engine on their van every 2 hours and rev the fuck out of the engine ALL NIGHT long. 30 minutes of revving every 2 hours. Omg wtf.

An old convent in Venice. It had a single exit, which we found out when the fire alarm went off. It was a very large and high spiral staircase in the middle of the building.

It was 40C with 90 percent humidity. Of course, it did not have AC. Everyone had their window and door open at night and just hoped they wouldn’t get mugged.

Cheap, though.

Definitely the one in China where a breaker box in the stairwell exploded. We were very lucky the whole place didn’t burn down.

Motel 6 in Seymour, IN. Saw serval roaches, smelled of cigarettes and stale curry, broken AC (in the middle of summer), the carpet had various stains, bathroom was as clean as an outhouse…

And we had to sleep next to a rotting petri dish of a jacuzzi. Here’s a pic

My wife and I had booked a hotel with “shower en suite”. We assumed that this meant that the hotel rooms bathroom had a shower instead e.g. a tub.

Nope. In the middle of the room, there was a plastic booth not unlike those portable toilets you can find at festivals. This was the shower. You had to drop in coins to get warm water in the shower.

There was no bathroom as such. A common toilet was half the stairs down from the room, and it ran out of toilet paper on the weekend.

The breakfast was rather spartan, a lot of “either this or that, but not both” selections.

This was very emberrasing for our friends who had recommended that place (and helped us with a roll of toilet paper). They had been in that hotel some 30 or 40 years before, when it still had style…

Some crack den in Coalinga, CA when a friend and I were trying to meet halfway between Sacramento and Los Angeles on the 5 Fwy. His car had broken down so we were forced to stay there one night; it happened to be Halloween so the town was a little wild but our hotel was full of bugs, drugs and other fun surprises.

Myself and two friends went to Seattle to race (sailboats) and one had booked us a hotel on Aurora, I don’t remember the name unfortunately. When we got there they were both kinda iffy on the place but I didn’t notice anything too weird. It was your average cheap ish hotel. I had also had a few drinks by this point so that might have had something to do with it. Anyhoo, we went out drinking and had a lovely night, came back and passed out. In the morning I went to use the bathroom and as I’m sitting there everything started to come into focus, and yeah, it was pretty gross. I wandered back out and laid on the bed. As I reached my arms behind the pillow to stretch, my hand hit something, I grabbed it and pulled out a meth pipe. Nice. We packed up and headed to the front desk. They really didn’t want to refund us the money for the next two nights but when I put the meth pipe on the counter they suddenly decided they’d be able to do that for us. Ended up sleeping on the floor at a friend’s house and had a grand time.

An Econo Lodge in San Antonio. The guy changing the bloody sheets wasn’t very happy that I took pictures.

I cant remember the name but it was a hotel in Bruges. The lobby looked lovely, but everything else was strange or run down.

Honestly thinking back I feel like it was a fever dream. They had a lift that was incredibly small. The stairs were steep and covered in this really cheap thin red carpet that did not muffle the sound of people walking. To get to my room I had to go up two sets of stairs, and then down a set of stairs.

The room required me to then go down another set of stairs, open the door for it to hit the end of the bed. The mattress was all spring, uncomfortable and had me waking up with backache. The windows were on the ceiling, but difficult to open and the room was stuffy.

The shower seemed to have been put in what used to be a closet. No proper ventilation, and a skanky shower curtain. When turning the shower on it was equivalent to someone pouring water from a watering can on me.

I complain, but it was booked and paid for by someone else. Bruges was lovely and I was only sleeping in the room for a couple of nights.