Stories: Hotels
-
The world's worst hotels were recently listed, including the most disgusting in America and Britain. Share your own stories of bad, good, awful, excellent and interesting places you've stayed.
51 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 2 3 Newer→ Last
-
That first link is broken Russell.
-
Fixed now ...
-
I've endured plenty of fleapits around the world, but here's one place I don't think I'll be staying any time soon:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/2278438/Five-star-hotel-boss-slams-one-star-parked-cars
-
Maybe once in Paris in 2004. The sink drained directly on to the floor, and there was a window problem: leave them open, to reduce the overpowering mouldy odour but this mean't that small flocks of pigeons flew indoors. The poor Canadians, two floors down, were completely flooded out. But our children found it all very exciting--especially firing darts at the school-ground seven stories below.
-
But our children found it all very exciting--especially firing darts at the school-ground seven stories below.
Paper darts, or the spiky pub kind?
-
To brighten things up a bit...
A couple of years back I stayed at the Rainbow Hotel not far west of the Sky Tower during the Armageddon Expo. It's a well-kept place that's perfect bang for your buck. Don't be put off by the Engrish on the website - I personally find it an added charm.
-
Stayed in a backpackers in London (Bayswater I think) where the shower had been converted from half a small wardrobe making it approx 30 cm wide. It was not possible to turn around in this space.
You had to put shampoo on your hands and raise them above head height then sidle in, wash and rinse hair, sidle out, lower hands, sidle in, shower one side of your body, sidle out, turn around, sidle in and shower the other side. -
When I was little I used to spend a fair bit of time in the hotels my father stayed in. That started in the seventies, but the tacky (in all senses) brown and orange carpets never changed. The definitive stuck in the seventies scungy hotel was the Hydro Grand. My partner was booked in there by his boss about a decade ago. He lasted an evening before we moved him to my mother's. Nothing had changed since 1977, possibly not even the sheets.
I'm still devastated that the current owners are trying to have it demolished.
That whole link is fascinating and kind of weird for me - there are all the places I used to drink before I left for varsity. Also right down the bottom is a poem from 1869 advocating early closing:
Of early closing, ladies, we would speak :
Your kindly aid and sympathy would seek,
That we our business premises might close
At seven each night, is what we would propose.etc.
-
Paper darts, or the spiky pub kind?
Papers darts--but the pub kind might have attracted more attention.
On the local front, the Princeton Towers in Symonds Street are pretty 'orrible. Stayed there so my daughter could cosplay at Armageddon. After the first night, we had 23 bath towels, in a soggy heap, attempting to sop up the overflow from the shower.
-
The worst hotel I've ever stayed in wasn't particularly dirty -- but it was weirdly depressing.
I arrived at the Swan & Dolphin, Walt Disney World Resort, Orlando, Florida, about 4am; the last to be dropped off by the airport shuttle after flying for ever.
I got up about 8am, a Sunday, and staggered down to one of the restaurants, where actors in Disney character costumes were bothering children. That was weird. I've never been comfortable with fancy dress ...
I never got used to the hotel's design: the building was semi-circular and lacked internal reference points, so it was hard to work out where you were.
The horrible marine-themed paintings on the stippled walls didn't help either -- it was like a lame attempt to add some soul to the place, and it didn't work. And it got worse when the Lotus convention I was there for started on the Monday -- the hotel simply wasn't big enough or fit for the purpose, and I got pinned against the wall trying to get to my first session.
If ever there was a place to make you hate capitalism, this was it.
I wondered whether it was just me, but Paul Brislen went there a couple of months later for an IBM conference. He felt the same way.
-
We just did an amazing trip round the middle east and ended up somewhat randomly in this hotel in Damascus. Really the pictures show only half the joy of the place. We really did get to sleep in that four poster bed and the staff were great.
If you get the chance at all, visiting Syria and particularly the old city in Damascus is an amazing experience and if you can, try and stay at the Shahbandar Palace. Note you can't drive a car to the hotel door the streets are too narrow so backpack or good wheels on your bags are a must :). -
ended up somewhat randomly in this hotel in Damascus
Holy crap. In a good way.
I've stayed in a motel in a small Louisiana town with plastic mattress covers. No matter how little you moved, the bed squeaked all night, waking you up. Frankly, I think most of their customers were the 'hourly special' kind...
-
The Quest on The Terrace -- a vile office conversion -- used to be top of my list of Wellington hotels to avoid but it may have improved since its refurbishment.
Quest on Gilmer claims to be four-star, but beware of its cheaper rooms. They looking nothing like the pictures on the internet and are depressing in the extreme. Try CityLife next door -- it's suite.
Confusingly, the Quest Wellington is actually alright -- and you can see all of Xero's wi-fi networks through the wall. (Yes, they're secured.)
The Quality on Cuba St is way cool. Ask for a corner room. Just don't mix it up with the Comfort, with which it shares a reception -- that's looking seriously unimproved these days, and the rooms only have dial-up internet.
The Museum Hotel is nice on the newer apartment side, but a bit pricey with it.
The last time I stayed in the James Cook, my room was small and scruffy. I try and avoid staying in "proper" hotels now -- a decent kitchenette, a flat-screen telly and a couch are all more important than a fancy reception, IMHO.
-
ended up somewhat randomly in this hotel in Damascus
Yeah, that happened to a bloke called Paul, once...
-
I know this sounds kind of comical, but it really isn't.
We stayed in Varanasi, India where we shared the hotel floors with monkeys. Many of these monkeys were bigger than me and totally not scared by humans.The hotel managements answer to the problem was to give you a long stick to defend yourself with. I mean, how do you fight a monkey? Every time we left our room it was red alert.
-
Yeah, that happened to a bloke called Paul, once...
Yeah I think we saw the tomb that purported to contain his head ... or was that John's head ... someone's head anyways.
To expand on our hotel experience a bit.
We had crossed the border from Jordan to Syria earlier in the day, having spent the morning in the ruins of an amazing roman city in Jordan. We were prepared for several hours of questioning and searches to determine if we had ever been anywhere near Israel (they are still officially at war after all). Instead we were met by our guide who dealt very quickly with customs and it turned out to be one of the easier border crossings.
From there we went to the ruins of another roman city, there were a few of those on our trip but this was pretty impressive with an amazingly well preserved roman theatre, of much the same design as a modern stadium. It even came complete with a party of screaming schoolkids on a day trip. What was fascinating was to see the blend of Nabatean ruins (this apparently was where the Nabateans spent their summers when not in Petra) with Roman ruins with ruins of Mosques and even abandoned fruit and vege stores from the locals who had only recently been moved out by the government. 4000 years in a hundred meters.
Then we piled into our van and drove towards Damascus. As we drove we noticed the weather changing and we ended up driving through a spectacular lightening and rain storm. After having to stop a couple of times because the engine was overheating we drove through the storm and out the other side into Damascus, which turned out to be a huge modern city full of maniacs in cars. Do not even consider self-driving in Damascus!
Our driver found his way to the old city without killing us or anyone else on the roads and we piled out of the van. We then proceeded to wheel our bags through about half a kilometer of the alleys weaving in and out of the evening shoppers and going ooh and ah at the stuff in the shops as we went by. We finally found our way to a nondescript door on a back alley. I guess at that point I wasn't really sure what to expect but the door opened into the hotel seen in the pictures in the above post.
That first night we dumped our bags in our amazingly pretty rooms and went down to dinner in the open air courtyard. The food was good and we were hungry. But halfway through dinner the storm we had driven through caught up with us and it started to rain. They closed the sliding roof, but the weather was a bit more than the design could handle and the rain coming down the walls of the courtyard found it's way into lighting circuits, which resulted in a charming candle lit dinner :). It says a lot for the staff and the feel of the place that what could have been an unpleasant experience instead became a highlight of the trip.
-
__ended up somewhat randomly in this hotel in Damascus__
Yeah, that happened to a bloke called Paul, once...But what was the hotel like before its conversion?
-
how do you fight a monkey?
-
But what was the hotel like before its conversion?
We walked past several similar places as we wandered the alleys in Damascus. Some like ours had been renovated. Some were shells with bars on the windows and filled with rubble. Apparently many of them are still owned by Jewish families living in Israel and protected by the Syrian police for "when the families come back".
-
But what was the hotel like before its conversion?
Spartan?
-
Did a *lot* of travelling that involved staying in hotels & motels in the
1980s and 1990s (all of it in 1st-world countries.) Some of it was over-the-top grandiose (The Mayflower in Washington, where my mother asked for a large bed (she's not a small woman) and got a single bed that measured *3.050* metres across - yep, I'm the kind of weirdo that travelled with a tape measure.)And some of it was breathtakingly nasty (the motel we stayed in, in Utah, that had a sign in the shower "Do not wash your dogs in here." Someone had clearly not only ignored the sign, but failed to remove doghair and turds from the place...the toilet still had that paper thingy on it, but the cleaner just didnt want to do anything about the shower...)
And then there was the wonderful YHA-equivalent in Boston: we were met by a hunchbacked dwarf (I kid you not) who gave us the tiniest towels (less than facecloth-size) & teeniest packets of soap (think 2 gumsticks) I've ever encountered, and wanted $USA payment before she gave us the keys-only she wasnt sure they were the keys, so gave us 2 each...well, no probs with that. The 3 of us staying there, Marian, my mother, & self, all had separate single rooms. My mother was woken by a highly civilised rat which pattered along the footrail of her bed, but desisted from further invesitigation. (This visitor was mitigated by a grey squirrel outaide her window next morning.) Both Marian and I were woken by the same poor bloke - who had been given the keys to our rooms. He was African (by accent, not African-American) and he opened the door & yawned - which is when I sat up saying WTF? Seeing only teeth & eyeballs (I always leave my contact lenses in overnight when I travel.) His startlement was equal to my own...then he went along to try his other key - which opened the door to Marian's room...May I add that I received some of the best hospitality ever in the USA too?
-
By no means all the trips when I was an IT journalist in the 90s constituted a junket -- but a few did. And never more than the time Nokia flew me to Singapore for the launch of a new phone (no, really) and put me up in the Ritz Carlton, along with journalists from all over the Asia-Pacific region.
It's the swankiest hotel I've ever stayed in, with the view from the bathtub and the breakfast buffets warranting particular mention. The morning I checked out, Rod Deane was being ushered to a car-with-driver.
Sadly, there are way swankier hotels I've never set foot in.
-
Hey! You've got an edit button!
(I liked 'snakier'-) -
The Quadrant in Auckland is ok.
And the LivingSpace in Christchurch, which tolerated us having heaps of oddly dressed people for a pre-fetish-ball party.
-
Hotels. Now there's something I used to know quite a lot about. When I was a child - from the ages of 10 through 18 - every year, for three weeks in the May holidays, my mum and dad, and two younger brothers and I would go on a trek around the South Island. And at other times, we went around the North Island. No budget holidays these. So I was very familiar with the inside of the group of THC hotels, and less familiar but still well acquainted with some other very fine places. One Christmas we even spent a month in the White Heron Villas (across the road from the hotel). The ones I remember the most are the Cherrywood Motor Lodge in Dunedin, Noah's in Chch, the Grand in Invercargill, the Rutherford in Nelson, the Hermitage, and the James Cook in Wellington. Not to mention the Sharella - also in Wellington. Loved the James Cook. When I was at Marsden, when Mum and Dad would come down, that's where we would stay. I used to enjoy the ice sculpture in the dining room beyond anything reasonable. Of course, I've stayed in other hotels in other parts of the world, but the ones that meant the most to me were the ones of my childhood.
Post your response…
This topic is closed.