I pulled in late and tired to a random motel 6 in Illinois. Went in to the office with my wife and three small children, talked to the attendant through thick bulletproof glass to get a room. Attendant was very weirdly hesitant.

Went to the room, found the floor was linoleum tiles that were all peeling up at the edges, doors, doorframes, beds all in bad condition, some seriously weird and disturbing smell we didn’t recognize.

Came back down to the office and asked for our money back, which is the single solitary time I’ve ever done that at a hotel. The attendant seemed relieved and was very happy to return the money.

Our kids were really little but they’ve always remembered that and they call it the “nope-tel”

Place in Las Vegas. They had a coin operated shower. You could pay by the night or by the hour.

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

the breakfast buffet at Circus Circus in Las Vegas was a surreal experience.

If you were to look at it or photograph the food it all looked completely normal. But I have never encountered a situation where everything was utterly devoid of flavor. It was like encountering the literary device of eating food in hell where all looked fantastic but was like ashes in the mouth.

It extended to every dish. Sausages, eggs, biscuits, pastries. Nothing was edible! Lest you think me some picky eater my guilty pleasure used to be the Big AZ burger at 7-11. The food at Circus Circus was simply inedible to a degree that i’ll never forget it.

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.

Tame compared to some of the other stories here but the Motel 6 across from Disney World in Florida when I was visiting for a high school trip. I noticed that the soles of my feet were all black and assumed it was because I’d been walking around in the parking lot in bare feet. Turns out it was actually the carpet in the room. I wore my shoes in the room for the rest of my stay.

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.

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

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.

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.

Edit, oh and the fire alarm went off at 3AM!

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.

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, absolute shithole. There was no water. They knew the water was out but didn’t tell me until after I checked in.

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.