Frequent Travelers Break Down The Biggest Red Flags They Look For In A Hotel

The first job I had after things started opening up again required employees to come into the office twice a week. We could choose the day. Not wanting to move, especially to such an expensive area when I only had to be in the office two days a week, I decided to book a room at Extended Stay every week.

During my first stay, I spent two nights shaking and shivering, unable to warm up.

I used to make fun of my parents for checking the thermostat in every hotel room, but I finally learned the value. For every week after that, the first thing I did when I checked in was to make sure the thermostat worked and request to change rooms if it didn't. I was much more comfortable after that.

I was lucky that the thermostat worked in most of the rooms and there was always one available if I needed to switch rooms. Some hotels have broken thermostats in every room, or other red flags such as reports of bed bugs or lack of privacy.

Redditors know these red flags all too well, and are ready to share.

It all started when Redditor Traditional_Dirt_788 asked:

"People who travel, what is an immediate red flag in hotels?"

Freshly Scented

"Overly aggressive air fresheners. If you get to the hotel and the room has a strong air freshener smell they are trying to mask bad smells like mold, sewage, or worse."

– Im_not_matt

"When you complain that the room smells, and the employee sprays a Lysol like air freshener and you have to tell her, that is the smell."

– lo-lux

"This is me tonight. Last night, I called the front desk to complain of the chemically sweet smell in my room. I then noticed the plug-in air freshener next to the phone."

"The air freshener is now living in the refrigerator."

– Pleased_to_meet_u

Creepy Crawlies

"Little dark-brown spots near the top of the bed, below the mattress on in mattress seams. These mean bedbugs."

– KarlSethMoran

"Adding to this, if you get a scratchy throat and eyes the second you get in the room, it's possible they're treating a bedbug infestation and you should leave unless you want to find out how well the treatment is going."

– jesuseatsbees

"Mattresses piled up by the dumpsters/trash (red flag for the possibility of bed bugs)."

– Draedark

""Look! They upgraded the mattresses just in time for our special trip!""

– flabergasterer

"Bloodstains on the wall. They tried to get rid of bed bugs but failed, so previous guests were smashing them by hand. They did not bother clean the wall."

– Krek_Tavis

"I honestly think you could have stopped there, without getting into the specifics. There are very few circumstances, if any, where bloodstains on the wall would not be a red flag."

– malsomnus

Safety Always

"Bullet proof glass around reception office."

– deligonca

"I had a recruiter desperately trying to sell me on a contract job in Lagos, Nigeria. Part of his sales pitch was that the hotel lobby was bulletproof and the car park was secured with guards with guns so I could be picked up and dropped off at the client site without worrying about carjacking at the hotel."

"Yeah, no I'm fine."

"I'm sure it's not nearly that bad, but the fact that he felt compelled to repeatedly assure me of my personal safety set off all my alarms."

– Wind_Yer_Neck_In

"My wife booked a room in a smallish town for one night and for some reason decided the only criteria was to spend as little money as possible despite us normally staying in fairly nice hotels. When we pull up to this place, you can't even go inside the "lobby." You drive through, and everything is behind bulletproof glass, and keys are slid to you in one of those little divot things like banks and movie theaters used to use."

"When we got to the room, it was the smallest sh*t hole I've ever seen. It looked straight out of a horror movie, complete with a single flickering light bulb for both the main room and the bathroom. The effects crew just hadn't managed to get blood splatters everywhere by the time we showed up I guess."

"On top of that, the door didn't lock and as I'm standing there trying to figure out how to keep it closed a car drives by reeeeeeeeal slow with two dudes in it who definitely knew where to find the cheapest meth in town."

"I packed our stuff back in the car, turned in the keys, and drove 5min down the road to a hotel that didn't look like it rented rooms by the hour. I still remind her of that every time we check in to a hotel."

– kamarg

Anywhere But There

"Your Uber driver asking “you sure?” as you pull ip to the hotel."

– MayonnaiseFarm

"I had an uber driver tell me, "If I knew that this is where we were going, I would not have picked you up."

"I am a HARDCORE PUNK MUSICIAN, and that was the scariest hotel I have ever stayed in. In fact, at 52 years old and a life of travel, the only hotel I have been scared in."

"I let my wife pick my hotels when I go out of town now."

– middleagethreat

"Many years ago, when I still had a "dumb phone" and traveled with a printout of mapquest directions, I went to a festival a few hours away and booked a hotel a town over from the festival. I had a low-paying job at the time, so I got the absolute cheapest hotel I could maximize the money I could spend at the festival itself. The hotel had "4 out of 5 stars" so I figured whatever, it's dirt cheap, I can sacrifice one star of creature comforts to save a quick buck."

"So I get to the town and I'm driving through this absolutely decimated strip of what once seemed to be a cute downtown, but was now boarded up storefronts... I'm struggling to find the hotel, and without the realtime directions of GPS, I had to stop and ask for help. I go to a nearby McDonalds and go in to ask a cashier if they maybe know where this hotel."

"The cashier, a visibly gay older man, clasps his hands and puts them on the counter and peers over to gaze at me with this look that's like half pity and half exasperation, and drawls in this thick southern accent, "Honey, you don't want to go there.""

"It took some convincing, but he did eventually give me directions to the hotel. He was right about it though, from the bulletproof glass round the front desk to the multiple police calls from a domestic violence incident on the second floor, I didn't stay long and fled to another more expensive hotel."

"Oh, and those 4 out of 5 stars? The hotel site games the star ratings. If you leave a review, the site "assigns" you a star rating based on your answers to a series of yes/no questions like "was there enough parking?" "was the room clean?" that you must answer in conjunction with your text review. Absolute bullsh*t."

"It was in Gastonia, NC by the way, if anyone is wondering where NOT to stay for events in Charlotte."

– ChuushaHime

Anyone There?

"This only applies to larger hotels:"

"When all employees are really young. Not a single employee over the age of 20-23 in view."

"This, in my experience, means that whoever is managing the hotel is only hiring the cheapest possible employees, who generally don't know their rights. In every occasion like this, service has been completely absent."

– azthal

"This is such a good one!! I’ve worked in hotels and would always walk through lobbies and check for people working front desk who were older. If only management is older- not likely somewhere I wanna be."

– Ellerich12

Picture This

"An easy red flag is when you’re looking a place over online, and there are absolutely no photos of the exterior or street / neighborhood, just generic-looking photos of beds and the breakfast room."

– AnotherPint

"Ha good one! For me it’s also the opposite- if it’s in a famous or popular area and they only show you pictures of the local attractions."

"Sometimes they’ll have 9 of those pics and then the 10th is of the room where it looks you’ll be kept until you’re sold."

"Also if the room is big on theme and chunky thematic items but skimps on comforts and necessities *glares at Arashiyama airbnbs*"

– ValBravora048

Online Buzz

"Read the google reviews before you book and see if the owners/managers respond kindly (if at all). If they attack the negative reviewers at all - stay away."

– islandsimian

"As a former hotel supervisor, I want to stress this point."

"I once worked at a property where the GM was extremely petty. One of my jobs was to manage the social media accounts for the hotel. Whenever we had a guest who was upset with us, the GM would make me remove comments, or would make me submit a response that was wholly inappropriate. One guest posted pictures of bedbugs and my GM accused him of lying and made me remove the photos."

"If you ever see something funny in the reviews (on the management side), stay away."

"I haven’t managed a business Facebook in a while, so I don’t know if this has changed, but it’s harder to remove reviews than it is to remove comments. So if there’s bullsh*t you need to report, don’t just write a comment, write a review."

– Legitimate_Net3101

Breakfast At Dinner

"I used to travel internationally A LOT for work, so I have quite a few hotel horror stories."

"Anyway, the most immediate red flag was when I checked in and asked what time breakfast was served:"

""Breakfast starts at 9am.""

""9am? That's pretty late. I have meetings in town before then.""

""Oh, do you want it now?""'

"It was around 8pm at the time. It didn't get any better from there."

– cold_italian_pizza

Blaring Siren

"When you walk into the reception for the first time and a man is shouting “THIS IS THE WORST F**KING HOTEL I’VE EVER STAYED IN!” before storming out."

– steve3000daddy

Romanian Holiday

"I once had brown water coming out of the faucet at a hotel in Romania when I wanted to freshen up after checking in. It didn’t get any better from there."

– xelferz

"I was staying at a place in Romania and they told me not to open the windows because of the bears..."

– Hexcited

Broken Doors

"Have traveled in China quite a bit for work. There were red flags everywhere..."

"Did a job up in Blythe (UK) a while ago. We asked the customer where to stay and their nearest recommendation was about 20 miles away. We said "really?" and they said "yes, really.""

"A guy from another company also working on the project stayed in a hotel in Newcastle. He collected his key and went to his room to find the door had been kicked off the hinges. He called reception and told them this. They misheard (to be fair he was from somewhere near Fort William) and said, "Oh, can't you make the key work?" "No, the door is lying in the middle of the room and the hinges have been torn off the wall." "Oh, no worries, come back down and we'll give you another room." Like this was perfectly normal."

– Conscious-Ball8373

Red Flag After Red Flag

"I don't know if this counts, but we went back home to visit family for the holidays. We decided to get a hotel so we can have a reprieve from the chaos, so we booked this okay hotel (we knew it wasn't fancy)."

"We were kinda surprised at how sh*tty it was. The pictures made it look okay--classic 2.5 star hotel vibes--but coming in... The breakfast bar online was a hot bar with nice food. In reality, it was a couple vending kinda things with cereal in it, and Styrofoam cups for coffee and OJ."

"The person that checked us in said "sorry, our cleaning staff called in." Now, that was weird. All of them?"

"We go to our room, and it looks like all the furniture was grabbed off the side of the street. It was rough."

"It was like 1am and we were exhausted after a 10 hour drive. We just kinda shrugged, not that big of a deal."

"We did our quick check for bed bug sh*t, and didn't see anything. Bed wasn't the worse we've had by far. The most miserable piece of sh*t bed I ever had was at a 4-star hotel in downtown Chicago. Anyway, I hobbled into the bathroom to shower, and see pink mold all over, and water damage all over the ceiling. Gross."

"The next morning, we're getting ready, and walk down the hall to go about our day, and the owner and his family are putting cardboard over a window. In the middle of the night, someone broke in through the window in one of the vacant rooms to try to steal the TV, which is presumably bolted to the wall. They failed their task, apparently."

"Without much debate, we decided to skip the free breakfast."

"We pile in the car to go see family and I see I have a text from my mother in law."

"My mother in law texts us and says to get out of the hotel. We're like, "why?" (We can guess why)."

"She said there's a couple people she knows that found roaches and ended up with bed bugs from staying there. It's a known drug hub. They have no staff, she said, and they haven't for a while. Huh. I thought, I guess they didn't "call in.""

"Sh*t. Alright."

"We decided to pack up our sh*t and drive 40 min down the highway to the next town to stay at a much nicer hotel. It was miles better, but we didn't get a refund on our original hotel unfortunately. In an effort to save money, we ended up paying for two hotels."

"When in doubt, get the more expensive option. Don't go cheap, especially in a tiny town. Buy cheap, buy twice, as they always say."

– KourteousKrome

Note to self: Spend a lot when it comes to hotels.