Hotel horror stories: Dirty sheets, cockroaches and leaking ceilings

EVERYONE has a story to tell about a hotel stay, some are worse than others. From dirty sheets to unexpected guests, you’ll be glad this wasn’t you.

Businessman Sleeping in Motel Room

THE hospitality industry is filled with tales of blunders — from ceilings that leak with questionable liquids to sheets speckled with stains of indeterminate origin, and everything you just can’t make up in between.

We’ve gathered some of the worst of the worst. So sit back, enjoy, and be thankful none of these people were you.

The Wrong Room

“We were in Denver and one of the guys we were travelling with woke up in the middle of the night with a strange, drunk man passed out next to him,” says a travel writer who would rather go unnamed.

Turns out, the guy had forgotten both his key and his room number. When the intoxicated man went to the night clerk to sort things out, he blurted out any number he could think of “and the front desk just gave him a key, no questions asked!”

Too drunk to realise you’re in the wrong room.

The Infestation

This is the story of how a couple ended up sleeping with the lights on, in a bed pushed into the middle of the room. It happened in the jungles of Guatemala at a rustic — er, very rustic retreat.

“We came back to the room, and immediately I saw a huge cockroach crawling over one of my bags,” says Joe, in his mid-30s. The couple killed the creature themselves, but that was just the beginning. “We pulled back the curtains, and they were literally crawling with cockroaches.”

The couple stormed up to the front desk, which was curiously prepared with anti-cockroach spray. “The staff asked us if we had food in the room, which we didn’t, and then they asked if we had toothpaste, which of course we did.”

According to this hotel, cockroaches have a thing for the stuff. “We sprayed the room, aired it out, and cleaned the carcasses off the floor. I think were about 12 in total,” Joe says. There were no other rooms so the couple pulled the bed into the middle of the room, left the light on, and slept very little.

Beware the creepy crawlies.

Drip, Drip, Drip ...

A drippy faucet is annoying. A leaky ceiling is even worse. A ceiling oozing with human excrement? Ya don’t say! But someone on Trip Advisor did, with this baffling headline: “Great hotel for the price, but leaking raw sewage through ceiling” Hmmm. We’re not sure at what point value makes that kind of thing OK.

Or then there’s this couple, who talk about the sewage pipes bursting in the room next door, then seeping though — on the first of their nine-day stay. And this guy, who was put into a room that was already in the midst of a sewage leak. Time to ask for another room, folks.

That Had Better Be Chocolate

Smudges on white sheets are never a welcome sight, so “imagine my horror when I came into my room one evening and found dark, brown-coloured stains wiped on the lower portion of my pillow and the sheets of my turned-down bed,” says a travel journalist named Michael.

“I dared not approach, since there was nothing else in sight to suggest their nature. And yes, I thought the worst — so many people use the same sheets in a hotel that stains could go unchecked.” The writer called the front desk, which sent a member of the cleaning staff to investigate. Soon, they uncovered a half-eaten chocolate bar stuffed under the covers. “And this was a five-star hotel,” he says.

Do a thorough check of the sheets.

Careful Where You Work Out

Even if you can do sit-ups in your room, sometimes it pays to just go to the gym.

As Ashley Norman, a publicist from New York City puts it, “How about the time I was doing sit ups in my hotel room in Chicago. I looked up and found a used condom stuck to the underside of the bed.” She jumped up and called the front desk, which sent up a young man with rubber gloves to remove the thing. “I guess that’s what I get for not going to the gym,” she said.

Hello Neighbours!

Have you had walls so paper-thin you could hear every word and sneeze coming from your neighbour? Annoying, but what about walls so fragile you could just knock them down?

Author of Directions to Happiness Bruce Northam tells us: “I was in a hastily constructed hotel in Bali with my brother. I gave him a humorous shove and he bumped into the brick wall, which then completely collapsed! It was a stand-alone wall dividing two rooms. Hello neighbour!” They were staring at two Indonesian honeymooners.

The Succubus of the Sochi Games

Ah Sochi. Some medals were won, Bob Costas got pink eye, stray dogs were ruthlessly murdered, and about $51 billon was spent. But after that, the big story was the abject deficiency of the hotels that Russia built to accommodate the games.

By the time the journalists started to arrive, only six of the nine hotels were finished and people found themselves in rooms without heat, running water, internet, or capable toilets. Doorknobs fell off and there were rumours of spy cameras in showers. What’s more? Hallways were strewn with dogs (probably hiding for their lives), elevators didn’t work, and at least one lobby had no floor.

Dinner ruined by an explosion of hot spa water.

The Michelin-Starred Spill

Sometimes the worst problems aren’t in the rooms — they happen in a hotel’s restaurant.

“We were having dinner at this five-star resort’s Michelin restaurant in Italy. We were sitting in the terrace when all of the sudden the outdoor jacuzzi above busted and began to overflow onto all of us,” says travel TV personality and writer Jimmy Im. “People freaked out. We had already been served our food and it was completely ruined. They moved everyone’s seats, but we were already soaked. I felt really bad for the staff who had to deal with it.”

This article originally appeared on Yahoo Travel.