Responding to another thread about Portsmouth made me think about the worst hotel I ever stayed in.
Now I am not sure if it is good form to name such places so I will avoid doing that here. But it was a hotel chain charging about 70 quid a night. This is what happened:
1. First words of greeting from the legendary reception man “Jesus Fucking Christ…someone is definitely going to be punched today”. I said hello and that I was here to check in (9 year old daughter by my side) – he carried on his expletive-peppered story of his day so far. He asked if I had parked in the car park. Yes. He asked if I could pay the fifteen quid now – in cash. The online booking said it was free parking so I shared that info with him. Shrug. “OK” … “You can park for free, I don’t care”.
2. The room was comically tiny. I could not fit my whole torso in the shower. I am a big chap 6’5″ but I am not obese and this would have been a ridiculous proposition for anyone. Even for my normal-sized daughter child.
3. So I went to see my new friend at Reception who was winning hearts and minds with his car parking cash-only in advance scam again. As I waited, he was being rebuffed by another guest. He repeated that he didn’t care, shrugged, and let the other guest park for free too. Weren’t we lucky people?
4. I explained my predicament with the size of the room and wondered if there were any larger ones? He said – and I swear this is true – that there was a spare room for cripples and because I am tall, I count as a cripple!
5. We had dinner that evening in the restaurant. As we waited, I chatted to my daughter but couldn’t help noticing the (lack of) movement of the other diners. There was only about 6 of them and they were dotted around the tables – silent, crumpled piles of humanity – each of them the wrong side of 90, I would say. Most fast asleep – a scene you might witness at a hospice. No carers were to be seen and each meal was untouched.
After one uncomfortable night, I decided that we we should check out. We’d only committed to one night anyway. A different receptionist said that I had to pay for the parking and wouldn’t let me leave until I paid the fifteen quid in cash. Because I wanted to leave I said I could pay on my debit card – if I must – but I did not have any cash on me. “That’s no good” – I was told it had to be cash. A stand off. She said I could go. As I got to my car, I looked in vain for anything that mentions a car park charge…
Do you have a hotel story?
Shown to a room with a soiled nappy on the bed, obviously used by a friend of the proprietor. Wiped our feet as we left. Shown to another room, this had a stand-alone metal shower in the room had to negotiate it to get past to the bed. Had to stay as it was late.
Being veggie all there was for me at ‘breakfast’ was a plate of beans.
Still shudder as I walk past it on visits.
Think it has changed hands and is better now.
All to often, even when I have been explicitly told that veggies are catered for, I end up with wan toast and weak coffee, because ‘vegetarians catered for’ often turns out to mean ‘we serve cooked eggs’ (no thanks). I often write to them afterwards and give feedback and have had a couple of successes where the breakfast menu has been adapted as a result. No point in complaining if you can’t offer suggestions of how to improve.
As it happens, we were in Warwick last week where we stayed at a pub on the Market Square called the Tilted Wig, and they do a very good veggie breakfast that will keep you full till evening – http://www.tiltedwigwarwick.co.uk/
Care to name and shame, BC?
The hotel clearly treat their staff as badly as their customers and as a result they can’t keep good people and everyone is unhappy. I have some sympathy with hotel staff, particularly after sitting in the reception at the Old Trafford Premier Inn in Manchester (a perfectly pleasant, if bland, place to spend a night or two) a few weeks ago and witnessing the manager handle a series of trivial and narky complaints from a couple of sour-faced middle-aged women who clearly just wanted to complain about anything and everything to spread their misery around. Having worked in retail I’m usually on the side of anyone in customer service who is trying to do the right thing, unlike the indifferent, and possibly criminal, people you met in Portsmouth.
Mind you, the poor sods behind the counter probably have to live in Portsmouth, which would make anyone miserable. I’ve only been there once, in the mid 90s, and thought it was the biggest dump I had ever seen in Britain. Still did until last week when we found ourselves in Northampton for a couple of hours – strewth!
Well given it was 4 years ago, I would hope that a hotel chain like Ibis would have improved in that time, so I am reluctant to name and shame.
…and although central Portsmouth is still quite the dump, the Gun Wharf area and the Naval Dockyards where HMS Victory is – and Southsea Castle – are all quite lovely these days. I have also stayed at the Premier Inn in Southsea and that was exceptional. Clean room, good food (esp Breakfast) and nice atmosphere/good beers in the bar area.
Leave Portsmouth (town of my birth) alone!
It has Pie & Vinyl and…and…well the Wedgewood Rooms
Have you see Southampton lately?
You should have come to neighbouring Wellingborough first (my home twon for the last 24 years) – you’d have appreciated the charms of Northampton a lot more.
Town, even
that’s pretty impressive.
I can’t match that.
Me neither. I’ve only stayed in the most delightful hotels. What’s the point of staying in a bad one?
The tale I enjoy the telling most is of a B&B in Youghal, county Cork. I guess the omens were not good as we arrived as the landlady was roaring drunk on our arrival, howling with laughter in the company of an equally drunk one-legged man in a wheelchair. Very Twin Peaks. The room was OK in a faded potato famine elegance, with orange brushed nylon sheets, you know, the sort that were once de rigeur, with a tendency to form little bobbles with use. The bobbles in these had carefully each retained a selection of curly hairs, indisputably pubic. I tried to ask for a different room but the couple downstairs were beyond mammalian movement and so we just snuck out and drove away.
I played on a football tour in Moscow in the mid 90’s. Our hotel was a tall, tower block thing. The rooms looked like someone had stolen the furniture and just left a couple of disheveled beds and one wooden chair.
Breakfast was one boiled sausage and a spoonful of peas. The bar was ok but after about an hour, hotel security asked me to go with them. I did (making sure I had a witness) and they sat me down and asked me to get the rest of the team to quieten down. I did what I was asked.
The lifts were great – there were two lifts either side of the lift lobby. The ones on the left went up to even number floors and the ones on the right went to the odds. This caused great confusion after a night at the bar.
All this pales after what happened on the second night. We were drinking in the bar. A Russian man with 4 girls in tow came in an joined one of our tables. He order several bottles of vodka and proceeded to get all but two of the football team drunk on Vodka. I was one of the two and I left with the other sober player to go and play pool in the coffee shop area. We felt that the bar was getting edgy.
We hadn’t finished our first frame when we heard a commotion by the bar door. We looked over and hotel security had arrived (well 4 blokes that look like they came from central casting for Russian security thug). The Vodka buying Russian was dragged out. One of the 4 women came running after him but she was thrown back in the bar. The Vodka buying Russian swung a punch at one of the security thugs. 5 seconds later he had been punched about 10 times by the security guard and was lying in a heap on the floor.
At this point, one of the guards shut the door to the bar. Once he had done that, he stood with his foot on the Vodka guy’s head. One of his colleagues then kicked Vodka Guy in the head so hard that, if it were a football, it would have reached the opposite penalty area. He went into a spasm and then the 4 security thugs picked him up and carried out to the front of the hotel, threw him in the back of a car and drove off.
I went to bed.
‘Do you have a vegetarian breakfast option, please?’
‘Da – spoonful of peas’.
Reigate, three days before Christmas. I’ve been assigned to help with an IT project for Legal & General, who are minted and have a menacing head office that looks as if it was designed by Speer. It is looking like snow on the M25.
The project is boring and pants, the project manager is an arsehole and the project team of sundry despondent misfits are using an antediluvian system to document everything.
It’s a four hour drive to get there from Foxy Towers, it’s been a long day, and I’m heading to the nearest largish hotel, which is perched upon Reigate Hill overlooking the spoiled remnants of what was once a charming part of Surrey, a county that has now long been in thrall to the motor car, whose noise it is impossible to escape, is jammed with golf courses, and teems with moneyed ignorami and those who resent them.
I check in, noticing the faint odour of uncleaned carpet that greets me in the lobby and as I make my way upstairs. The room is similarly grubby, overheated and blandly identikit in that chain way that only the travelling professional or the budget conscious tourist has to bear. I shower – it works – change and descend to the restaurant for my evening meal, famished and waiting to just quietly eat, read and sleep, preferably in that order.
The restaurant is closed.
“Sorry sir, there’s a private party this evening and the restaurant is closed.”
You what? You’ve taken my money (OK, it’s on expenses, but it’s still wonga you’ve accepted) for a hotel room. That’s a HOTEL room, not a doss-house. And now you tell me, at eight in the evening, that you refuse to feed me? You can eff right off matey. You are not running a hotel if you have closed the effing restaurant.
I had to kick up the mother of all fusses, and barely managed to contain my choice of profundities, until eventually they laid a single table for me in the restaurant, where I ate a barely adequate dinner while watching a hundred loud, obnoxious twerps getting rapidly lathered having their office Christmas knees up at the other end of the room.
I never darkened their smelly doors again.
L&G are closing that place next year. They used to have on site accommodation, (closed last year), an old country house which, I’m told, was used in one of the St Trinian films. The front of the main office building and some interiors were used in the last series of New Tricks.
I stayed a couple of nights in one of the cells there; much nicer than the ghastly hotel.
I’m now wondering which of the two hotels I know of up there it was. L&G being in Kingswood, it’s probably the most convenient place you could stay which is a shame – Reigate itself has plenty of places to eat in, but not many central places to stay and it’s a long way down the hill to the town centre.
We arrived in Zhongwei, Western China after a 14 hour overnight journey on the most uncomfortable of train carriages with a toilet that was pretty unbearable. We had looked forward to a nice shower and the chance of pleasant ablutions.
We were reliably informed that our Hotel was the best in the city. If that were the case I dread to think what the others were like.
The carpet looked like it had never been cleaned. There was an unravelled condom on the floor – I refrained from checking if it had been used or not.
The shower room too was filthy.
My daughter was 9, it was the year before the Beijing Olympics – we were towards the end of the first week of a 2 week holiday. We were miserable and as we lay on our beds as hard as floorboards the conversation went like this: ‘ What do you think of the Hotel, Layla?’ My daughter: ‘It’s rubbish dad, why are we staying here?’
‘Apparently its the best hotel there is’.
‘Mum has been to China before and knows what it was like, why has she made us come here?’
Worst hotel: a doss house on River Road in Nairobi, 1986. The room had two single beds – well, mats on the floor – which was what we were expecting. We weren’t expecting a member of the staff to be asleep in one of them though. After kicking him out we decided not to lie on or anywhere near his festering pit, so two of us (my companion was female but we weren’t ‘together’) nervously cuddled up on the other. Shortly after midnight people started trying to get into the room, trying the lock. We spent the rest of the night leaning against the door.
Best hotel: The Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong, 2005. When I got out of the taxi the doorman said “Hello Mr Chiz, welcome to the Oriental.” The kid who took my bag knew my name too, and the receptionist, and the lift operator. Turned out they had a deal with the taxi drivers to look at your baggage tags as they loaded them at the airport and text ahead. Then it was a bit of paper palmed from person to person. Brilliant personal service and that was just the first two minutes.
I do remember a hotel in Kinshasa circa 1983. No lights in foyer no light in room no lift working. No sheets or blanket on the bed.
We ripped the curtains off the wall and used them.
Vegas. Early 90s. Drive into town mid afternoon and travel down the main strip looking for a decent, cheap motel. Try a bunch of places but no joy.
By now we are well off the strip – casinos and fast food joints replaced by blank faced store fronts and garages – we pass a billboard advertising a hotel charging $19 a night.
The reception floor is sticky with glue, a pile of the old floor tiles in the corner and new carpet still to be fitted – the place is undergoing on the hoof repairs and updates. Our room is in a block across the (busy) road. Drop the bags and venture out to the temptations of a Vegas night.
On our return we find the door card doesn’t work (actually, doesn’t fit!). In reception they look at us blankly then explain that they are replacing all the doors and give us a new key – we’re just relieved that they don’t deny we even stay there so don’t complain that someone removed our hotel room door, leaving our belongings at the mercy of any light fingered chancer.
Next morning, reach for the box of emergency breakfast cookies. Take a bite and realise something got there first. Look at my hand; the remaining half a cookie is crawling with tiny ants. Spit the mouthful of cookie crumbs and ants into the bin.
Yosemite. Trying to find somewhere, anywhere to stay, we are offered, in no particular order, a novelty teepee on an old pallet, a divided trailer which hadn’t been cleaned, ever. We settled for a run down motel where they served reformed “steak” with powdered mash potato on a slice of bread. With gravy.
Ahhh that reminds me of a motel somewhere in Tennessee or maybe Kentucky. Usual thing; empty swimming pool, ice machine honking away outside the window, coin-operated vibro-bed. All of which is quite charming really. We checked into the room, then went back to reception to ask where nearby we could get a beer. “Abaht thirdy miles, Honey, this is a draah county.”
NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
Should have gone to the Tenaya Lodge Cottages, on highway 41, just outside of Fish Camp, a few miles south of the Park entrance.
Stay in a whole floor of a huge log cabin; ours had two huge en-suite bedrooms, both with Holy Roman Emperor sized beds, a fully equipped kitchen area, a TV that must have weighed around three metric tonnes, and a spacious lounge and a balcony overlooking the forest.
No restaurant on site in the reception areas – just a breakfast bar – but the full blown Tenaya Lodge hotel (humungous cost, valet parking, G&Ts the size of a bucket, outdoor fire-pit, Caesar salads a yard wide and a foot deep etc etc) is a short stroll away through the trees, and you can avail yourself of their bar menu, which beats most British hotels into a cocked revolutionary tricorn for no more than a pub dinner would cost you in Blighty.
If memory serves (this was about 7 years back) our luxury forest cabin accommodation was $140 – so $70 a head, at the time around £50.
Deffo heading back there again for a couple of nights on next year’s tour of duty free.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@37.4728411,-119.6387905,3a,75y,96.54h,94.93t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sVOq9QH_w7vp6hJKK2IymDQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1
PS It was called The Apple Tree Inn back then, but has been re-badged since in line with its big brother through the trees.
This was 1999. The internet was in its infancy. We spent 3 weeks driving around California with nothing booked except 3 nights in San Francisco at the start and a couple of nights in LA at the end. this was the only dire place we found although the sparseness of Motel 6 grated a bit by the end. Best and worst food was in San Diego. Worst was an expensive place with lousy service, the best was a large but cheap Mexican restaurant recommended by a girl in a book store. The patrons were, as we’d been told, about 50% Mexican and the food was just fantastic. Accommodation in San Diego was an old fashioned motel where the receptionist was a heavily tattooed Chris Isaak lookalike and it was sited next to a tiny bar which served HUGE Margaritas with delicious salsa and nachos. One evening we called in for a quick drink before going to find somewhere for dinner but didn’t make it because we got ver, ver drunk. San Diego was a highlight and is on our list of places to go back to.
I may have posted this before, but as a 19 yr old I travelled alone to Stafford to see Bruce Springsteen. I needed to stay overnight, but naturally at that age I made no plans in advance. Ended up staying in a 5 quid a night B & B, sharing a room with a complete stranger who was an overweight guy who seemed to be 50 something, I seem to recall bunk beds but my memory may be off.
After the show I got back at around 12.30, he was sleeping. I stripped to my underwear and went out to use the bathroom, realising a few minutes later I was locked out. Hammered on the door to wake him up for some time to let me in, but failed to arouse him. So I had to get up the owner to let me in. Embarrassing scenes all around. Hardly slept because the guy was snoring too much, snuck out early, missing breakfast and got train back to Liverpool.
“but failed to arouse him.”
Even after you’d stripped to your underwear?
Ha ha. I was so innocent. The thought of the guy being in any way a danger never entered my mind.
an overweight guy who seemed to be 50 something
That could be an Afterworder
It was a striking vision of my future.
‘and teems with moneyed ignorami and those who resent them’ . Thanks, Foxy, that made me laugh.
Around 20 years ago I stayed, on business, at a hotel just outside New Malden in Surrey. It looked as though it hadn’t been decorated since the 1970s and had been furnished with the contents of the local junk shops. No piece of furniture in the room matched any of the others in either style or colour, it had dark coloured flock wallpaper and was barely illuminated by a 40 watt bulb. Pulling back the blankets – they obviously felt duvets were a dangerous modern invention – on one of the twin beds revealed a neat cluster of pubic hairs in the centre of the sheet.
Strangely though it had a really good carvery restaurant.
Macara, southern Ecuador, we roll up to the hotel after a long day of birding and given keys to our “modern” room with hot and cold water.
A standard size double bed just fitted in the room, perhaps a foot of space around it, certainly not enough room for our rucksacks and photography/birding gear. We complain at reception and after much huffing and puffing we’re given a much bigger room at the front of the hotel. A chance to relax, a hot shower, a meal. No hot water, the temperature of the water is slightly above absolute zero, complain at reception, the mangeress has gone home, the night watchman didn’t speak English, my Spanish would, I am sure, have been understood by 99.9% of Spanish speakers but he decided that it was easier not to understand me.
After a barely adequate meal of rice and very dry meat we turn in for the night to find that the curtains will not draw and the brightest streetlight in Ecuador is directly outside our window, no matter anyway as it’s fiesta time in Macara and the street parties are so loud it would be impossible to sleep, we drink 2 bottles of wine instead.
At last the celebrations stop at about 2am, we are just starting to drift off to sleep when “Bang, bang, bang, bang” Look out of the window and the night watchman is kicking a football against the wall of the hotel directly under our window, I open the window and shout at him but again he decides my Spanish is not understandable, I dress and go downstairs to pucture the fucking ball but when I get there he is nowhere to be seen. I go back upstairs and go back to bed. “Bang, bang, bang…”, this time I think good old Anglo-Saxon language persuades him that he has pushed it far enough and he stops. Again we drift off only to be woken 20 minutes later by a shouted converstaion in the cirridor outside, 4 of the revellers (2 couples) have just returned and are just arsing about on the corridor. They understand Anglo-Saxon cursing well enough and retire to their rooms only to indulge in the noisiest and longest sex session I have ever had the misfortune to overhear.
Finally, must be 4.30 am all is quiet, then the eartquake hits – not a massive one but the building shook and screams echoed all around. It only lasted 30 seconds or so but it was a scary half a minute.
We’re off birding at 5.30 so it hardly seemed worth trying to get back to sleep. We dressed, packed our bags, got our kit and left. As we walked away the night-watchman came running after me,
“Senor, donde es la clave?”
“Sorry, I don’t speak Spanish”
I still have the key.
As a child I lived for while in a former one once. Haunted Gothic Victorian job. Wicklow. Was used as the main set in Zardoz, a couple of years before.
How was that Tibetan yurt @rob_c?
It’s not a Yurt. It’s a Karmalodge. There’s a ban on Marxists over the holiday season and the owner owes me a perpetual one as I healed his rune dog who was afflicted with mandrake harvesting tinitus.
That’s an absolutely rubbish haiku, Rob.
I stayed in a hotel last night, in Cambridge. It was OK, comfortable beds, bathroom fine etc. The only problem (apart from lack of conditioner which appalled my 21 yr old daughter) was that the TV screen was tiny – like a computer screen. So lying on the bed to watch it was impossible, they should have supplied binoculars. Very first world problem compared to the stories above, but for 75 quid you’d expect to be able to actually SEE the TV screen.
Then the included “Free Full English Breakfast” – ONE egg, bready sausage, 3 soggy mushrooms, and the tea – FFS the tea! A large metal pot with umpteen tea bags as a help-yourself. Bloody hell, I take it black, this was like liquid shoe polish.
Like I said, first world. But important.
It wasn’t somewhere the board recommended on your ‘getting around the U.K.’ thread, was it? If so we’re all so very, very sorry!
No no nobody’s fault but mine! I did take the advice to train it to Cambridge though.
Isn’t one egg the norm in UK? In Canada it’s 3. Rest doesn’t sound too great though
Maybe it is – in Australia you always get two eggs, anywhere
I was always glad to see a good tea and coffee spread in the room when I spent a lot of time traveling in the 90’s. One night I got in from work and filled up the kettle for a brew. Cuppa made I lay on the bed to drink my tea. It tasted a bit odd but I put that down to the local water. Kettles in hotel rooms being small I had to fill it up again for a refill. When I flipped the lid off to fill it from the tap all I could see was the sodden, liquidized mass that was once the instructions and guarantee in the brand new kettle.
Just did that the other day with new stove-top espresso pot, EVEN THOUGH I SAW THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THERE WHEN I BOUGHT IT.
Reason: am knobhead.
Admittedly, was also very, very refreshed by the time I’d come to suggest making coffee, late at night, post-BBQ.
Mostly knobhead though.
Never yet had a BAD hotel experience. No FANTASTIC ones either, mind. Plenty of so-so ones, but nothing interesting enough to write here about.
As long as the room isn’t freezing (in winter) or baking (in midsummer), the room (and bed) is clean, the staff civil and the breakfast is edible I’m not fussed, generally.
30 different hotels this year already…
My worst was the YMCA in Boston Mass. Both freezing (-15 outside) and boiling (incredibly hot radiator with no controls). I could only regulate temperature by opening the window, which would not close. Door had clearly been forcibly entered many times and patched up. Carpet stuck to your feet. When I went to the (communal) loo and shower I noticed there were three pairs of shoes in the next cubicle… Funnily enough it was not cheap. I seem to remember $100 twenty five years ago.
But I was staying because i’d landed in Boston and found out Gil Scott Heron was playing that evening. So it was worth it. (Even though his first comment in stage was to slag off the UK)
Worked in Gabon for short periods a couple of times when Omar Bongo was Preaident and his judicious ditribution of the country’s oil wealth meant that half the indigenous population did fuck all but sit in their flats and drink beer. The other half were pygmies who lived in the jungle so none gave a shit about them.
We stayed in a fantastic French hotel, entirely staffed by Camerounians. I had a beautiful villa down by the beach.
First night, I went to the hotel disco with my German colleagues and had several drinks. A couple of the guys picked up hookers ( Camerounian) and I ended up spending some time chatting with the manageress of the club, also from Cameroun. She was very, very attractive and friendly. She asked where I was staying and I told her the villa number.
I retired from the fray about one thirty and crashed out. Around three thirty, there was a knock on the door. In came the manageress who swiftly disrobed and climbed into bed.
She left around eight in the morning. I was rather surprised she hasn’t asked for compensation and was slightly nervous for a few days that it was going to end up on my bill as room service and I’d have some explaining to do back in London.
“she hasn’t asked for compensation”
As opposed to remuneration? What the hell did you do to her? Or not?
I was thinking more along the lines of ‘compensation for services rendered’, rather than for any injuries inflicted.
My mother who knew Paris very well booked a place for me and my dad in the Pigalle district. After an evening walk we returned to this place, past a girl splayed out over a car – “she’s a prostitute” – my dad told me, as if I knew what that meant. The hotel was the kind of place that rented rooms by the hour, not for the whole night. There was no end of doors banging and all sorts the whole sodding night. I was about 12 or 13, didn’t have a bloody clue what was going on and and the girl was still there in the morning. it looked as if she hadn’t moved at all. To this day, I still don’t know what the hell my parents were thinking of.
When I was living in Japan, I booked myself into a traditional minshuku in Kamakura. I fancied a bath in the evening, went down to what seemed like a very large bathroom, locked the door, settled in and bathed. After 5 mins, tap on the door – “i’m having a bath”, 30 seconds later another tap – “I’M HAVING A BATH”. This went on for a few mins until I shamefully realised that i was in the public bath and the stupid gaijin was preventing the other guests from bathing. To their eternal credit, the owners said absolutely nothing, didn’t poison my breakfast the next morning (I was the only foreigner there) and were remarkably charming about everything. What they said behind my back is quite another matter.
Stayed in a large hotel in Hastings about 10 years ago for a work training thing. There were four of us on the same course but only two of us arrived in time for dinner the first evening.
We didn’t know each other very well and he was not a talker.
The dinner experience was like a cross between the Marie Celeste and Fawlty Towers.
We were the only people in an absolutely vast restaurant area, crammed into a corner by a window.
There were five waiters/waitresses and it still took them at least 20 minutes before asking us what we wanted for drinks and then a further 20 minutes between each course to take our orders.
The food took more than an hour and a half to arrive and three out of four dishes were incorrect.
Conversation was incredibly stilted to start off with, despite my best efforts, but eventually we were united in our quest to locate the hidden cameras because surely to goodness the staff were on a bet to provide the worst and slowest possible service.
I drive past the place occasionally on my way to Bexhill for a gig and it still makes me snigger.