“I’ve stayed in so many hotels this month I barely know my own bedroom any more, but I’ve used the experience to compile a hospitality gripe list,” wrote our columnist Jo Ellison back in June. Her ensuing rules for better hotels (“No weird lights”, “Kill the quilt”) became our most viral piece of the year to date, proving so popular with you, the dear reader, we felt honour bound to revisit the topic.
And as so many will be on holiday now, suffering the thousand-times-magnified discomfort that only a bad mattress on a dream break can provide, we thought we’d cheer you with some true horrors. I, for example, have just returned from two nights in an otherwise entirely delightful Italian hotel. Arriving at night, I entered my room in the dark; it was only when I awoke the next day that I discovered a wall-dominating version of “The Last Supper”, featuring a gigantic Donald Trump, at the foot of my bed. I can confirm that will affect your dreams. So here, our favourite FT writers present their own hotel nightmares, with perhaps one to remind you that Airbnb is no reliable indicator of a good time either. Janine Gibson
Bad karma in Indore
John reed, FT South Asia bureau chief
My worst ever hotel stay was this past March, when I was reporting a story in Indore. Or maybe it’s only the most recent horror one remembers: there was also that place with a bathroom spider the size of my palm (in Zimbabwe), the B&B room I had to enter through a tiny door beneath a family’s TV set (in Naples), the place infested with so many bed bugs I had to sleep in the bathtub (in Arizona).
In Indore, the property itself was nice enough: spotlessly clean, friendly staff, part of an international chain (name withheld). But there was a curious sign on the front desk: NO PARTIES IN THE ROOM, all caps. I thought this was funny enough to post on my Instagram.
The last laugh, of course, was on me: Like many Indian hotels, this one had a lucrative side business in hosting weddings — and at many Indian nuptials, the wildest partying and drinking happens away from the prying eyes of relatives, in parked cars or hotel rooms.
The din of revelry from the room opposite mine — doors slamming, people shrieking — went on all night. I couldn’t sleep; front-desk staff told me they were powerless to help — or perhaps unwilling to confront a party of paying (and rather posh) guests.
The ordeal was made worse by the freakish misfortune of a horrific bout of food poisoning that consumed me all night, I believe caused by a piece of unwashed fruit. I emerged from it a few kilos lighter, and convinced the snarky Insta post earned me the bad karma.
Loose with the truth
Rebecca Watson, assistant arts and books editor
If the mark of a good hotel is that there are other people there, then it was bad news from the start. The fact that we were on the side of a busy main road was its own hint — that hot stretch of tarmac would become familiar, dogs barking manically at our steep ascent as we tried to find somewhere to eat.
The promised swimming pool provided paddling only — it came up to my waist — while the room seemed like a remnant of a forgotten hospital: dark, musty and clinical. But all of this was peripheral. No, the heart of the matter was the man in charge. Truth was liquid in our man’s hands, and trickled through the cracks between his fingers pretty quickly.
Arranging taxis with him to get to our next destination was made more curious by the pricing system that would escalate between conversations. But my favourite was the simple act of breakfast. We had been told on arrival it was €5 each. Later, when he checked what time we would like it, the price had doubled to €10 each. On checkout, interest had accumulated. It was €20 each.
Chancer, scammer, you can call him what you like. But whenever I think of bad hospitality, I think of our man with his fluid approach to the law of the land but who backed down at a nervy speed, with the defensive exclamation: “All right, all right, €20, €10, €5, fine, let’s not fight — it’s only breakfast.” It was only breakfast, after all — a stale croissant and a boiled egg, in case you were interested.
Last hurrah of Highland hospitality
Ruaridh Nicoll, FT contributing writer
The Ledgowan, Achnasheen, Scottish Highlands: In the late 1990s I rented a house, sight-unseen, on the shores of Loch a’ Chroisg in the Scottish Highlands. I’d taken a year’s lease to write a book.
The local village of Achnasheen was famous for its pub on the railway line from Inverness to Kyle of Lochalsh, a place where the people of the Gàidhealtachd would alight on their way west, drink themselves stotious, before taking on the late train. Unfortunately the pub burnt down two weeks before I arrived.
So on my first night I gazed over the few houses clustered on the rainy moor for alternative amusement. I had been warned that the Ledgowan Lodge Hotel, an old Victorian shooting lodge in some trees, didn’t seem welcoming to locals back then. But they didn’t know me, so I dropped in.
A family from an antique shop photo emerged from the tartan and dark wood, in black tie. I was shown to the bar. An ancient lady hobbled incrementally towards me to take my order. Concerned she might expire on the way I tried to rise but was ordered back to my seat.
In the dining room, a couple flinched as a firework substituting as a candle in their gateau spewed fire. The pallid owner watched as I scanned the many-paged menu. After I ordered, he enquired: “Would sir like his lamb pink or brown?”
It felt like a last hurrah of a Highland hospitality where lunches finished at 2pm, starters were glasses of grapefruit juice, and sharing a pudding was forbidden. But to be fair, it wasn’t the worst. The Loch Maree Hotel, just down the road, had killed eight people in 1922 with a bad potted duck paste.
Runner-up: The Hotel Chelsea, New York. In 1992, I answered a knock on my door to a lady asking if I’d like to join her in her room to smoke crack.
She’d peed herself.
Welcome to Hotel H-Wood
Jemima Kelly, FT columnist
My big sister was taking me to Los Angeles for my birthday and we were going full celeb. We weren’t going to stay in some quiet side street miles away from the centre; oh no, we were to stay on Sunset Boulevard itself. Our hotel was called Hotel H-Wood — yes that’s for Hollywood, baby — and it had its very own outdoor swimming pool, right in the centre of LA.
With visions of poolside lounging and glamorous soirées at the hotel bar, I packed itty-bitty bikinis, Britney-esque ultra-low-rise jeans, diamanté-encrusted crop tops, and GHD hair straighteners. I was off to schmooze with the stars and it was important to look the part (it was also the mid-noughties).
As my sister drove us courageously down a barbarous highway, I eyed a rundown “Budget Inn” smugly. But no sooner had we passed it than we were turning into the next-door lot. I was alarmed to see the sign by the entrance: HOTEL H-WOOD.
A micro-sized pool sat right next to the concrete car park as we entered, with the noisy six-lane Sunset Boulevard behind it, where ladies of the night prowled when it got dark. A two-storey L-shaped building with outdoor walkways and peeling paint stood in front of us. Tinseltown looked more similar to south-east London, where I lived, than I had imagined it.
Our suite boasted two single beds and a toilet cubicle, while the carpet paid a wonderfully visual homage to the guests who had stayed before us. Despite the sweltering July heat, we chose not to use the AC, because when you turned it on it smelled like sewage. Cockroaches lurked. Hotel H-Wood, it turned out, was for us a horror.
I remain very grateful to my sister for giving me a real introduction to LA. I think she was more scarred by the experience than I was — she has never returned to the city. I, on the other hand, am a big fan of it, now that I know where to stay: on the quiet side streets, miles away from the centre.
The Santorini hotel that stabbed me
Tom Robbins, FT Travel editor
Lots of people have had violent reactions to hotel art. I think I’m probably unique in having been hospitalised by it.
I was staying on Santorini at the Aressana Spa Hotel which, despite everything, I would heartily recommend: friendly, great location in the centre of Fira, nice pool — into which, on the first morning of our holiday, my kids were leaping with abandon.
I was inside, on my laptop in the otherwise empty and half-dark bar, finishing off work I’d failed to complete in the rush to get away. I scarcely noticed the large piece of art beside the table, an installation by Yorgos Kypris consisting of scores of slender metal fish attached to the wall, their silver tails curving outwards to give a sense of a shimmering shoal in motion.
Suddenly there was a big splash from outside; I rose quickly to go to the window but was stopped in my tracks, something snagging my arm. Looking down I saw I had been stabbed by one of the fishes, its sharp tail fin embedded in my forearm. Strangely it didn’t actually hurt too much; I unhooked myself, carried on working, then went down to lunch where my girlfriend handed me a comically tiny children’s plaster.
But as we passed the plates my arm began to feel heavier and heavier. After a couple of hours the flesh was as hard as a brick, my forearm pumped up like Popeye’s (the result, I learned later, of internal bleeding). The hotel staff were kind and apologetic (in a non-admission-of-liability way); a receptionist gave me a lift to the island hospital in search of something to relieve the still-building pressure.
And so, while the rest of the party headed to the beach, I spent the best part of two days waiting in hospital corridors and being treated by a doctor with a strong resemblance to Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H* (the experience extremely painful but also quite a good laugh). Afterwards, a combination of dressings and stitches I couldn’t get wet, plus some strong painkillers, resulted in another singularity: I might be the only holiday-maker to spend a week on Santorini and enjoy neither a drink nor dip in the sea.
Bats and bare bulbs in the Congo
David Pilling, FT Africa editor
In retrospect it was a good thing that we arrived after dark. Hotels in small towns across Africa can be excellent, with a warm welcome, home-cooked food and clean sheets. The hotel Riza, Kikwit, in the interior of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was not one of them. The establishment consisted of a jumble of dank rooms set around a courtyard and connected by a ramshackle staircase worthy of Escher.
Given the hour there was no food. This turned out to be no bad thing since it meant that the large bottle of Tembo beer — ice cold, to be fair — took quicker effect. Gentle inebriation helped us face the rooms. When I entered mine, I was struck in the head by a flying insect of considerable proportions. It was evidently alarmed at the prospect of sharing its habitat with a stranger. I was relatively lucky: my colleague Charlie Bibby’s animal-in-residence was a bat.
There was a grubby sink, a tiny bar of green soap and a towel that would have given sandpaper a run for its money. The taps had been dry for days, but a plastic bucket of water had been provided. Above the bed — sans sheets — hung a bare bulb. I didn’t inquire about room service.
It had been a long day — about 12 bumpy hours from Kinshasa. As I put my head down, the music struck up. Thumping bass set the concrete jiggling. The sound of flirtatious revelry rose from the courtyard. I would have shut the door, but it appeared glued to the floor. The Congolese music was excellent. That’s probably why it went on till 4am.
We liked the hotel so much, we stayed again on our way back to Kinshasa a week later. On the long ride to the capital, Charlie composed a song, set to the tune of “Hotel California”. Inevitably, the chorus went: “Not a lovely place, not a lovely place.”
Heat-induced hallucination?
Claer Barrett, FT consumer editor
The residents of Barcelona are currently engaged in all-out war with tourists staying in cheap Airbnbs, pushing up housing costs for locals. However, when I caught an easyJet flight there in the summer of 2006 with my then boyfriend, Airbnb did not exist, and our destination was a city centre hotel.
The name escapes me, but us being young and skint, it was one that had seen better days. The exterior facade and the reception were grand enough, with polished marble and high ceilings, but beyond this, standards slipped and the room that would be our home for three nights was tiny. But it was central! And we didn’t intend to spend much time inside.
This was the first holiday we had ever been on as a couple, so the stakes were high. We had been poring over a guide book — remember them? — for weeks in advance of our trip, and wasted no time loading up with fruit in La Boqueria, then jumping on an open-topped bus to explore the glories of Park Güell. The sun (and possibly sangria) went to my head on the bus home, so upon returning to the hotel, I flopped down face first over the bed, angling my head over the side to catch the narrow waft of breeze coming through the internal courtyard window. It was then that I saw it.
A cockroach, bigger than any I’d ever seen in England, wiggling its way along the skirting board towards me. Alone, having sent my partner on a mission to buy me a cold bottle of water and some aspirin, I shut my eyes, rolled over and hoped it would go away. It did — by the time he came back, it was nowhere to be seen. A heat-induced hallucination? Well no, as the next day, we saw it again.
We asked to be moved to a different room, but alas, they were fully booked. The receptionist was nonplussed, suggesting this was a normal feature of historic hotels as building work nearby was disturbing their usual habitat. Hmmm.
I came back into our room after breakfast and saw one static on the wall. It seemed to be somewhat stupefied as it didn’t scuttle away (maybe the hotel was putting poison down?). It didn’t take much effort to squish the giant bug with a flip-flop. Evidence! (Do bear in mind this was in the days before camera phones).
I marched down the stairs with the bug (having checked it was definitely dead) laid atop of a wodge of tissues, and planted it on the busy reception desk in full view of everyone.
I was instantly given €100 off our bill.
The dead cockroach bought us a very pleasant evening meal on our last night. We have never been back to Barcelona since, but my boyfriend was so impressed with my insect-slaying, money-saving savvy, he is now proud to call himself my husband.
Honeymoon suite from hell
Simon Usborne, FT contributing writer
It seemed like a neat idea. It was 2015 and an old railway linking Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, with the northern city of Jaffna had reopened, almost 25 years after its destruction in the country’s bloody civil war. What a story of hope and renewal, we thought. How cool it would be to venture way off the island’s well-trodden honeymoon path. How intrepid!
Now, I’m not fancy. Give me a rustic three-star guesthouse, run with love, over the corporate soullessness of a lot of modern luxury any day of the week. And I arrived in Jaffna with an understanding that tourism was in a rebuilding phase. But just as a train needs wheels that turn, any hotel has to get the basics right.
It was unfortunate, it would turn out, that Jaffna’s best guesthouse, where Angelina Jolie had once stayed, was full. So we checked in instead to the Tilko, a nondescript block near the old Dutch Fort. Its website proclaimed that chief among Jaffna’s attractions “is the accommodation afforded by Tilko Jaffna City Hotel that constitute a triumph of hospitality”.
It was soon clear, after some mutual grimacing, that this wasn’t quite true. The cockroaches weren’t great. The stained sheets, covered in hair (and who knows what else) didn’t exactly shout “honeymoon suite”. Nor did the granite-hard twin beds themselves, which were unwilling to be joined in any kind of union. The bathroom was worse, with rusting fittings and towels you wouldn’t inflict on a muddy Labrador.
I took photos of these snags to show an unmoved receptionist as we checked out early on day two. Honeymoons probably shouldn’t serve to test new relationships, but the images, which are still on my phone, stand as a marriage-affirming bookmark to thousands of pictures, now dominated by our two young children.
Could be worse, could be Airbnb
Stephen Bush, FT columnist and associate editor
The best thing about Airbnb is that it has made it much, much easier for people to rent out their properties as holiday homes and for would-be-guests to find them. This is closely linked to the worst thing about Airbnb, which is that it has made it much, much easier for people to rent out holiday homes and for would-be-guests to find them.
We were a largish party: all adults, no children. Our host’s relief that we were not a stag do, but instead planning to spend the time lazing by the pool and playing board games was evident; which seemed at the time like simple curiosity about our purposes but increasingly came to resemble a scene in a horror movie where the doomed teenagers are warned not to hang out in the abandoned coal mine.
It soon became apparent that while the cleaners had done a good job of removing the physical evidence of the guests just gone, in a very real sense, we were staying in a haunted house. (I shudder to think how it would have looked under an ultraviolet light.) Door handles had an unpleasant habit of coming off in your hand, leaving you stuck in a locked room. Beds superficially outnumbered guests but it became apparent that only a few of them had not been broken by previous incumbents. My delight that the bath was big enough to fit in was shortlived when the hot tap came off in my hand, while boiling water continued to pour into the tub as I struggled to escape. Fortunately, I lived to tell the tale: and in future, to restrict myself to holiday homes for smaller groups.
Illustrations by Mark Long
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