life

<p>When you&#39;re traveling, of course the best case scenario is for everything to be as inexpensive as possible.</p><p>That&#39;s why it&#39;s tempting to look for budget accommodations, wherever you go. But sometimes, cheap hotels are cheap for a reason. From bugs to surprise midnight visitors, <em>so much</em> can go wrong.</p><p>A <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/n316yf/whats_your_staying_at_a_cheap_hotel_horror_story/">recent Reddit thread</a> asked, &quot;What&#39;s your &#39;staying at a cheap hotel&#39; horror story?&quot; The answers might make you increase your accommodation budget for your next trip. </p><h2>1. Well, maybe you shouldn&#39;t have stolen the TV remote!</h2><blockquote> <p>A friend and I were passing through St. Louis and needed a place to stay for the night, but all the hotels in St. Louis proper were either booked or super expensive. We found one in East St. Louis, not realizing it is the shadiest place on earth. Strip clubs on either side, entire building smelled like burnt rubber, tried to open the window to get some fresh air and the guy at the lobby started yelling at us to close it for some reason.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><p> </p><blockquote> <p>Turned on the TV and it was just straight up [adult entertainment] on the first channel. Friend was reaching behind the bed to get to the outlet to charge his phone and ended up with a handful of [dirty] rags. Then to top it off, when we checked out in the morning, the guy tried to say we owed him $10 for stealing the tv remote. Moral of the story: St. Louis and East St. Louis are VERY different places. Do not make the same mistake. - therealsuperbonbon</p> </blockquote><h2>2. Sounds idyllic.</h2><blockquote> <p>I&#39;m a compulsive road tripper and I&#39;ve stayed at a ton of cheap motels. By a wide margin the most disgusting one I&#39;ve visited was a Motel 6 south of downtown Salt Lake City. [...] Out west this isn&#39;t that unusual for a Motel 6 in a city but trust me when I say this was by far the worst.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><p> </p><blockquote> <p>Our room smelled so bad of smoke that my skin felt like it was frying. It was a &quot;non-smoking&quot; room with ashtrays. Cigarette holes burned into the bedsheets, poop and various body fluid stains on the bathroom ceiling, walls, and floor. A used needle was still in the trash can. No towels in the room. You had to request them from the front desk and they&#39;d give you a once over before clearing you as worthy of cotton. [...] The Yelp page for this place has a picture of emergency response peeps taking care of a dead body. - Fogprowlr</p> </blockquote><h2>3. Wasn&#39;t expecting this plot twist.</h2><blockquote> <p>We found the only room in town, but the service was lousy. Maids wouldn&#39;t enter the room and just left towels outside the door.</p> <p>Turns out that the last maid who entered the room was murdered there a week before we arrived. - SeeingSongs</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>4. $10 is just too cheap.</h2><blockquote> <p>My first trip to Vietnam I stayed in a bunch of cheap hotels while traveling. Cheap as in $10USD per night cheap.</p> <p>The worst by far was a room that was absolutely covered in mosquitoes with no nets around the beds. So as soon as you laid down you could see hundreds of mosquitoes ready to feast on your skin. I ended up spraying myself and my sheets with deet and sleeping with the covers over my head. - steveopot13</p> </blockquote><h2>5. The perks of sleeping on the floor!</h2><blockquote> <p>Stayed a cheap hotel in London donkeys back.</p> <p>Was travelling and met up with a couple of mates doing their own travels.</p> <p>The room was two single beds, and being the only guy I volunteered to sleep on the floor between the beds.</p> </blockquote><p> </p><blockquote> <p>I was the only one to escape the worst case of bed bugs I&#39;ve ever seen, I don&#39;t know how they weren&#39;t in the carpet as well. The girls were covered head to toe.</p> <p>S*** was nasty, yo. - BKStephens</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>6. But how was the coffee?</h2><blockquote> <p>Detroit mid-summer with no aircon so we had to sleep with the window open on the groundfloor. Somebody tried to break down the door about 2am. Screaming came from the corridor randomly all night. Bedside light bulb was broken just jagged bits of glass sticking out. Coffee machine actually exploded, with sparks from the wall plug &amp; all. But weirdly the room was sparkling clean. - castrahibena</p> </blockquote><h2>7. Shower in the bedroom? Red flag.</h2><blockquote> <p>One had bed bugs. Another smelled like cat piss. But the worst hotels I&#39;ve ever stayed in have all been in the UK and they weren&#39;t exactly cheap. One in Belfast had a shower in the room. Not separate. But next to the bed. It was in the photos and we were like er yeah ok we&#39;ll still book it. But came to find the shower door didn&#39;t close properly. Puddle of water next to the bed.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><p> </p><blockquote> <p>The towels had stains on them and were tiny and didn&#39;t really soak it up. Oh and it was next to a f******* nightclub. Never again. The worst part was the staff were f******* polite as hell so I felt really bad checking out two days early. - SpencersFort</p> </blockquote><h2>8. Why was the floor squishy?!</h2><blockquote> <p>It was 15$ the floor was squishy my pillow had small blood stains on it, and there were burn marks in the sheets, we told the main guy about it and he said well you already paid so tough luck. The handy man was nice and kinda told him off saying we should atleast get a room that doesn&#39;t have a wet carpet, but we ended up staying in that room due to the owner being stubborn. Really should have slept in the car that night - kakkoochi</p> </blockquote><h2>9. NOOOOOOOO!!!</h2><blockquote> <p>Ants had been living in the shower head and pipe so after a long journey I was dying for a shower and jumped in and wondered why my hair felt strange and sticky and realised I had just blasted ants all over me that I could not get out of my hair. - sweet_cheesecake1492</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>10. At least it had a truck stop.</h2><blockquote> <p>Stayed in this motel a bunch of times as a kid, always thought it was nice, mostly due to the truck stop/burger place next to it. As an adult, took my wife there. It was a Motel 6 - not sure if it was a recent acquisition or if it had always been - and man, it was a shithole. The truck stop was still there, but the restaurant changed, and was crappy. All kinds of problems with the room, but more or less par for the course with Motel 6 (it&#39;s a crappy hotel chain, if you&#39;re not familiar - not sure they exist outside the US).</p> </blockquote><p> </p><blockquote> <p>What really tripped us out was the scratch marks on the door. In my wife&#39;s words, &quot;like a small animal or child tried unsuccessfully to escape.&quot;</p> <p>Goes without saying we will never stay there again. - experpernectu</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>11. Makes sense.</h2><blockquote> <p>When I was 20, I went to Ireland with my sister and uncle. Most of the trip we stayed in nice places, but the first night in Dublin we stayed in a run down place where our door has crowbar marks on it.</p> </blockquote><p> </p><blockquote> <p>That night around 1am, someone tried climbing in our window. We were several floors up.</p> <p>When confronted, the man apologized and said he thought it was his room. - GiantGoofus</p> </blockquote><h2>12. This is terrible news.</h2><blockquote> <p>Ya know how a single spider egg sack has like 1 billion babies. Yeah, motel in southern Cali had spider eggs hatch and there was a moving carpet of a billion and a half tiny baby spiders. The eggs were behind the tv. - Sack_of_yams</p> </blockquote><h2>13. It&#39;s good to know the spiders&#39; back story.</h2><blockquote> <p>Stayed at a cheap holiday camp with my parents as a kid. The holiday itself was great because my parents made it fun. I remember the caravan being run down and the shower curtain being covered in at least 10 fat black spiders. A mama spider must have laid eggs in the bathroom and all the siblings grew up and never left. - Jamvii24</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>14. It just gets worse and worse.</h2><blockquote> <p>There was a massive mirror that stretched the full length of the wall where the bed was, I could swear it was a two way mirror.</p> <p>There was a crew on site filming a horror movie.</p> <p>It had an indoor pool that had plants growing out of it and you couldn&#39;t see through the water, like something was going to come out and drag you in.</p> <p>Our door wouldn&#39;t latch, so in the middle of the night when the AC kicked on the door popped open just enough to hear the chain lock snap.</p> </blockquote><p> </p><blockquote> <p>We got a call at 2am from someone who kept asking how I was doing. His voice was very eerie and calm, he wouldn&#39;t change tone even after I was getting pissed asking &quot;Who is this!&quot; Later we thought it could have been a robo call and it just got stuck in a loop on the initial question.</p> <p>We had gotten in late and thought no big deal for one night. We were supposed to be there three nights, that didn&#39;t happen. - defytime</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>15. This sounds pretty sketchy.</h2><blockquote> <p>Extended stay of Raleigh near the mall. Dirty, not vacuumed or wiped down. The kitchen sink dripped the whole time, there were no towels or toilet paper - had to buy my own after the front desk refused to hand any over. Microwave didn&rsquo;t have a plate inside. The sheets were stained yellow. Pictures had been ripped off the walls and left huge holes. The water was black when I turned it on.</p> </blockquote><p> </p><blockquote> <p>When I tried to change rooms I was told there were no other rooms available and being too broke to go somewhere else, I sulked back to the room only to be woken up by fighting and police outside and a staff member knocking on the door a few days later asking how long I was staying. . . I have not received a response from corporate yet, but apparently they are closing this site down for lack of maintenance and basic human care. Thank god. Website was misleading. - Minimum_Command</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>16. Very safe.</h2><blockquote> <p>I stayed at a backpackers place in Melbourne where the &#39;rooms&#39; were just partitions - if you stood on top of the bunk bed you could look down into the rooms around you - I would guess there were beds for about 40 people on each floor.</p> <p>It was pretty cheap though. - Travellingjake</p> </blockquote><h2>17. This could&#39;ve been worse.</h2><blockquote> <p>Wife and I stayed in a Motel 6 during a cross-country move. Everything we owned was in the U-Haul parked in the lot. Room was filthy, floor was crunchy, no towels, smelled like musty magazines and cigarette smoke. I stayed awake as long as I could (wife wouldn&#39;t drive the U-Haul) trying to keep an eye on our worldly possessions, but must have dozed off. About 3AM someone knocked on the door. I bolted up and the door has half open before I woke up. Some dude stood there swaying. He looked really surprised to see me. Asked to bum a cigarette. Told him to f*** off, and he left. - Constip8d_Again</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div>

17 people share their horror stories from staying at a cheap hotel.

When you&#39;re traveling, of course the best case scenario is for everything to be as inexpensive as possible.That&#39;s why it&#39;s tempting to look for budget accommodations, wherever you go. But sometimes, cheap hotels are cheap for a reason. From bugs to surprise midnight visitors, so much can go wrong.A recent Reddit thread asked, &quot;What&#39;s your &#39;staying at a cheap hotel&#39; horror story?&quot; The answers might make you increase your accommodation budget for your next trip. 1. Well, maybe you shouldn&#39;t have stolen the TV remote! A friend and I were passing through St. Louis and needed a place to stay for the night, but all the hotels in St. Louis proper were either booked or super expensive. We found one in East St. Louis, not realizing it is the shadiest place on earth. Strip clubs on either side, entire building smelled like burnt rubber, tried to open the window to get some fresh air and the guy at the lobby started yelling at us to close it for some reason.   Turned on the TV and it was just straight up [adult entertainment] on the first channel. Friend was reaching behind the bed to get to the outlet to charge his phone and ended up with a handful of [dirty] rags. Then to top it off, when we checked out in the morning, the guy tried to say we owed him $10 for stealing the tv remote. Moral of the story: St. Louis and East St. Louis are VERY different places. Do not make the same mistake. - therealsuperbonbon 2. Sounds idyllic. I&#39;m a compulsive road tripper and I&#39;ve stayed at a ton of cheap motels. By a wide margin the most disgusting one I&#39;ve visited was a Motel 6 south of downtown Salt Lake City. [...] Out west this isn&#39;t that unusual for a Motel 6 in a city but trust me when I say this was by far the worst.   Our room smelled so bad of smoke that my skin felt like it was frying. It was a &quot;non-smoking&quot; room with ashtrays. Cigarette holes burned into the bedsheets, poop and various body fluid stains on the bathroom ceiling, walls, and floor. A used needle was still in the trash can. No towels in the room. You had to request them from the front desk and they&#39;d give you a once over before clearing you as worthy of cotton. [...] The Yelp page for this place has a picture of emergency response peeps taking care of a dead body. - Fogprowlr 3. Wasn&#39;t expecting this plot twist. We found the only room in town, but the service was lousy. Maids wouldn&#39;t enter the room and just left towels outside the door. Turns out that the last maid who entered the room was murdered there a week before we arrived. - SeeingSongs 4. $10 is just too cheap. My first trip to Vietnam I stayed in a bunch of cheap hotels while traveling. Cheap as in $10USD per night cheap. The worst by far was a room that was absolutely covered in mosquitoes with no nets around the beds. So as soon as you laid down you could see hundreds of mosquitoes ready to feast on your skin. I ended up spraying myself and my sheets with deet and sleeping with the covers over my head. - steveopot13 5. The perks of sleeping on the floor! Stayed a cheap hotel in London donkeys back. Was travelling and met up with a couple of mates doing their own travels. The room was two single beds, and being the only guy I volunteered to sleep on the floor between the beds.   I was the only one to escape the worst case of bed bugs I&#39;ve ever seen, I don&#39;t know how they weren&#39;t in the carpet as well. The girls were covered head to toe. S*** was nasty, yo. - BKStephens 6. But how was the coffee? Detroit mid-summer with no aircon so we had to sleep with the window open on the groundfloor. Somebody tried to break down the door about 2am. Screaming came from the corridor randomly all night. Bedside light bulb was broken just jagged bits of glass sticking out. Coffee machine actually exploded, with sparks from the wall plug &amp; all. But weirdly the room was sparkling clean. - castrahibena 7. Shower in the bedroom? Red flag. One had bed bugs. Another smelled like cat piss. But the worst hotels I&#39;ve ever stayed in have all been in the UK and they weren&#39;t exactly cheap. One in Belfast had a shower in the room. Not separate. But next to the bed. It was in the photos and we were like er yeah ok we&#39;ll still book it. But came to find the shower door didn&#39;t close properly. Puddle of water next to the bed.   The towels had stains on them and were tiny and didn&#39;t really soak it up. Oh and it was next to a f******* nightclub. Never again. The worst part was the staff were f******* polite as hell so I felt really bad checking out two days early. - SpencersFort 8. Why was the floor squishy?! It was 15$ the floor was squishy my pillow had small blood stains on it, and there were burn marks in the sheets, we told the main guy about it and he said well you already paid so tough luck. The handy man was nice and kinda told him off saying we should atleast get a room that doesn&#39;t have a wet carpet, but we ended up staying in that room due to the owner being stubborn. Really should have slept in the car that night - kakkoochi 9. NOOOOOOOO!!! Ants had been living in the shower head and pipe so after a long journey I was dying for a shower and jumped in and wondered why my hair felt strange and sticky and realised I had just blasted ants all over me that I could not get out of my hair. - sweet_cheesecake1492 10. At least it had a truck stop. Stayed in this motel a bunch of times as a kid, always thought it was nice, mostly due to the truck stop/burger place next to it. As an adult, took my wife there. It was a Motel 6 - not sure if it was a recent acquisition or if it had always been - and man, it was a shithole. The truck stop was still there, but the restaurant changed, and was crappy. All kinds of problems with the room, but more or less par for the course with Motel 6 (it&#39;s a crappy hotel chain, if you&#39;re not familiar - not sure they exist outside the US).   What really tripped us out was the scratch marks on the door. In my wife&#39;s words, &quot;like a small animal or child tried unsuccessfully to escape.&quot; Goes without saying we will never stay there again. - experpernectu 11. Makes sense. When I was 20, I went to Ireland with my sister and uncle. Most of the trip we stayed in nice places, but the first night in Dublin we stayed in a run down place where our door has crowbar marks on it.   That night around 1am, someone tried climbing in our window. We were several floors up. When confronted, the man apologized and said he thought it was his room. - GiantGoofus 12. This is terrible news. Ya know how a single spider egg sack has like 1 billion babies. Yeah, motel in southern Cali had spider eggs hatch and there was a moving carpet of a billion and a half tiny baby spiders. The eggs were behind the tv. - Sack_of_yams 13. It&#39;s good to know the spiders&#39; back story. Stayed at a cheap holiday camp with my parents as a kid. The holiday itself was great because my parents made it fun. I remember the caravan being run down and the shower curtain being covered in at least 10 fat black spiders. A mama spider must have laid eggs in the bathroom and all the siblings grew up and never left. - Jamvii24 14. It just gets worse and worse. There was a massive mirror that stretched the full length of the wall where the bed was, I could swear it was a two way mirror. There was a crew on site filming a horror movie. It had an indoor pool that had plants growing out of it and you couldn&#39;t see through the water, like something was going to come out and drag you in. Our door wouldn&#39;t latch, so in the middle of the night when the AC kicked on the door popped open just enough to hear the chain lock snap.   We got a call at 2am from someone who kept asking how I was doing. His voice was very eerie and calm, he wouldn&#39;t change tone even after I was getting pissed asking &quot;Who is this!&quot; Later we thought it could have been a robo call and it just got stuck in a loop on the initial question. We had gotten in late and thought no big deal for one night. We were supposed to be there three nights, that didn&#39;t happen. - defytime 15. This sounds pretty sketchy. Extended stay of Raleigh near the mall. Dirty, not vacuumed or wiped down. The kitchen sink dripped the whole time, there were no towels or toilet paper - had to buy my own after the front desk refused to hand any over. Microwave didn&rsquo;t have a plate inside. The sheets were stained yellow. Pictures had been ripped off the walls and left huge holes. The water was black when I turned it on.   When I tried to change rooms I was told there were no other rooms available and being too broke to go somewhere else, I sulked back to the room only to be woken up by fighting and police outside and a staff member knocking on the door a few days later asking how long I was staying. . . I have not received a response from corporate yet, but apparently they are closing this site down for lack of maintenance and basic human care. Thank god. Website was misleading. - Minimum_Command 16. Very safe. I stayed at a backpackers place in Melbourne where the &#39;rooms&#39; were just partitions - if you stood on top of the bunk bed you could look down into the rooms around you - I would guess there were beds for about 40 people on each floor. It was pretty cheap though. - Travellingjake 17. This could&#39;ve been worse. Wife and I stayed in a Motel 6 during a cross-country move. Everything we owned was in the U-Haul parked in the lot. Room was filthy, floor was crunchy, no towels, smelled like musty magazines and cigarette smoke. I stayed awake as long as I could (wife wouldn&#39;t drive the U-Haul) trying to keep an eye on our worldly possessions, but must have dozed off. About 3AM someone knocked on the door. I bolted up and the door has half open before I woke up. Some dude stood there swaying. He looked really surprised to see me. Asked to bum a cigarette. Told him to f*** off, and he left. - Constip8d_Again 

When you&#39;re traveling, of course the best case scenario is for everything to be as inexpensive as possible.  That&#39;s why it&#39;s tempting to look for budget accommodations, wherever you go. But sometimes, cheap hotels are cheap for...