I only use the hotel supplied internet if forced to and then only via a whole-connection VPN. Zero trust. I have a hotspot (Karma Go, though with their recent changes they are also zero trust and get the VPN treatment too) and expect to get another one once my remaining purchased time runs out on the karma.
The pillows are usually more of a problem than the mattress.
Lack of and /or placement of outlets. You shouldn’t have to plug your phone in next to the sink because that is the only outlet you can find. If you have multiple people or multiple devices the lack of outlets is terrible. But I have issues with a lot of the other options as well, except the cable tv one. That doesn’t bug me too much.
@remo28 that’s a great one. i wish more places had the nightstand lamp outlets. we were just in a hotel last weekend and there was one outlet behind the table and it didn’t even hold a plug so i had to unplug the floor lamp and use that. thankfully we brought our usb hub but that still didn’t fix the issue of wanting to use my devices while lying in bed at the end of the day. also once stayed in a place with fake outlets. that was really something.
I added a multitap extension cord with low profile plug (because the outlets are always behind something) to my travel bag years ago. But honestly, lately, most newer or refurbed hotels seem to make a pretty good effort towards providing accessible outlets. They still often fail… but I’d say it’s getting better.
I always seem to get put next to a family. The awful parents let their kids run wild until midnight and there’s at least one deprived child that will cry nonstop for an hour or two.
@FightingMongoos I work front desk in a hotel. Trust me, they’re our biggest peeve as well. Zero lack of common sense regarding sharing space with others and yet we’re the bad guys when we tell them to pipe down. Which we do every damn time
Sometimes I want to bring my dog. We have to stay in a pet friendly room. 90% of the time “pet friendly” means reeking of cat pee. And I’m super allergic to cats, so even in the well cleaned rooms I have to dose up on allergy meds.
@Oneroundrobb Oh, so you were the one with the friggin’ dog toe nails tip-tapping on the hard floor in front of the door that connects two adjoining rooms. Wow, that was annoying. “Just friggin’ lie down already, dog!”
@Oneroundrobb i would think people that are moving maybe, or going somewhere for a long time (for the summer, etc), or foster pet parents getting an animal to a new owner and are making a pitstop.
but also probably Crazy Cat Ladies who can’t be without fluffy for even a night.
@Oneroundrobb Speaking as a crazy cat lady, WHAT THE HELL? Letting cats loose in a hotel room is cruel to them, never mind what happens to the room or subsequent guests. If they have to travel at all, they’d be MUCH happier locked in the bathroom, which is a volume of space they can conquer in the course of an overnight stay and can’t screw up too badly.
@narfcake Honestly, if you have owned more than zero cats for more than two weeks and you let them get at the toilet paper, that’s an unforced error on your part.
Top marks and many thanks for the lolcat, though. I lol’d.
@Oneroundrobb there was a pet product convention in town, but they scoffed and told us people don’t bring their pets. Apparently, all business and no cute animals.
@f00l The least they could do is gve you a new dead stripper instead of a recycled one. Next time, load the stripper into the trunk of your car so he/she can’t be refurbished and reused. Repeat at every stop. Use lots of air freshener in the trunk.
Mattress too soft. Pillows too soft. Expensive WiFi. Insufficient outlets. No night light in the bathroom (the main light is so bright I can’t go back to sleep). Fixed shower head. And now, thanks to meh, I miss my bidet.
Okay, maybe this is TMI, but you know how some people like to eat adventurously on vacation? Sometimes those people’s roommates REALLY need a bathroom fan. Hotels never have them. I swear to fucking god, the only thing that keeps me from renting a second room on those nights is the belief that bad behavior (in this case, willful omission of standard bathroom equipment) shouldn’t be rewarded.
They have too much stuff in them. I don’t need a pile of magazines or any of the other stuff they pile on the desk/table/counter/wherever. My house is cluttered. That’s my fault. Please don’t preclutter my nice clean hotel room.
one time… and I’m not making this up… I found a pair of shit-stained tighty-whiteys in my hotel room closet. I suppose shit-stained isn’t a fair assessment – it was moreso an entire smashed turd. The Courtyard staff didn’t seem to believe me at first, but I made them come to the room and remove them. They comped my room, but I can’t get myself to stay at a hotel anymore. I’d rather camp…
The obnoxiously loud A/C window unit that is always right next to the bed. One time when maintenance came to fix it, they realized it was not secured to the wall. Every single screw was missing.
I don’t spend a lot on hotel rooms because I just need a place to sleep, brush my teeth, and take a shower. I don’t care if it’s the most modern looking thing, has a fancy coffee machine or anything like that.
I just want it to be clean.
First thing I do is turn down the sheets and look at them. Then I’ll look at the bathroom to make sure the toilet has actually been cleaned, that there isn’t any stray hairs all over the sink and tub.
As someone mentioned above about pet friendly hotels… When I visit my grandma, there’s two hotels. One pet friendly, the other one isn’t. The pet friendly one is really old… Which isn’t normally a problem. However, the last time I stayed there, we booked two rooms. One smelled like mildew, and the other one was fine. My mom was like, “I’ll just open the door to air it out.” “Fuck no you’re not. You’re getting a different room. They can air it out and figure out why it stinks while you’re relaxed in a different room.” Turns out the wall a.c. unit was leaking water inside the room and that’s why it stunk. That’s just inconsiderate employees. If you know there is a huge problem with the room, let maintenance know so they can try to fix it, let the front desk people know so they don’t rent that room.
@RiotDemon When road tripping I stay in the cheapest motels I can find. Big sci fi conventions are usually in nice hotels like Hiltons and Marriotts. And when I buy travel packages they often include stays in upscale resorts and high end hotels that sell vacancies to aggregators who then string them together in those travel packages. I wouldn’t pay the rack rate for those luxury hotels, but they sure are nice to stay in when a package deal puts them in comfortable financial reach.
@RiotDemon@moondrake We usually try to stay in nice rooms when on vacation. The logic is we want the place to seem nicer than our own house. Otherwise, why would we bother leaving the house?
@medz i’ve found there’s quite a lot of room between “nicer than my own home” and “shitty”, thankfully. sometimes you just need a place to be serviceable.
(our little attic apartment is far from fancy but it’s comfortable because it’s home. mentally comfortable, i guess you could say. maybe this is why i actually preferred our stays at middle of the road hotels vs the upscale ones where i felt a bit awkward. nothing like cringing while a valet parks or retrieves your twenty year old car or the bellhop carries your not-really-luggage bags XD)
@jerk_nugget Terribly sorry. I feel like I’ve made that mistake in the past… meh users are all androgynous to me anyway.
I NEVER do valets or bellhops. It seems like an extra inconvenience. Wait while someone gets my car. Wait while someone brings the luggage to the room. Nope. I’ve never stayed somewhere so snobby that you HAD to use valet. I think a Disney hotel (attended a conference there) forced us to do the bellhop thing because my work paid for the Disney bus to transport us from the airport. Basically, anything that got stored under the bus was to be taken direct to our room. In theory, it should get there before us since we had to check in, but no. We had to wait for it. Lame. I like to start getting settled first thing when I arrive. Only after that can I explore the resort.
@medz no apology necessary, i feel the same about People On The Internet.
we did stay one place where we had to valet the car, but when you’re in the city it’s kind of a necessity vs simply a luxury, if that makes sense. definitely having to wait (and having to tip) each time is…not ideal. however it was a very specific situation in which a friend had very graciously put us up in a nice hotel downtown after we had lost our last apartment. so it is absolutely NOT something i’m complaining about but also not something i would choose if we were vacationing. (although in this instance maybe it would have been fine since we wouldn’t have needed the car to do touristy things, except we were just trying to go to and from work and to apartment showings and whatever.)
And WTF with hotel WiFi anyway? It seems as if the price of the WiFi is directly proportional to the price of the room.
That $300 a night room downtown at the Marriott? They need $13 bucks a night for the internet to work.
That $30 no-tell motel out past the airport? Free WiFi!
This makes no sense, and having used both at different times I can attest: The difference in WiFi quality ain’t that much.
(Thank God for excellent Hot Spots and Unlimited Data plans!)
@simssj uh…not that I’m suggesting this. But call down the first night and tell the auditor the Wi-Fi isn’t doing shit and you’ve got work to get done. If your stay is a couple nights, talk to them at check out and remind them you had issues and just straight up ask them to remove the charge. Before check out tho and do it at the desk. They will, way more often than not. One router per floor means almost no chance of ever getting decent signals.
i was torn between the showerhead and the mattress. i prefer a detachable showerhead or at least one you can move, and of course i want decent water pressure. a few years ago we stayed in a lovely room at a best western and our stay was wonderful in every possible way…except the shower literally produced 3-5 very weak streams of water. it was horrible.
last weekend we stayed at a place where the water pressure was awesome, but the room only had a shower stall so there was nowhere to stand out of the spray of water which is a bit annoying. but worse was the mattress…i laid on it and then my partner laid down next to me and the thing was so bouncy and lumpy i actually asked in all seriousness if it was a waterbed. never encountered something like that before.
the real difference was the latter hotel room had our own balcony, was right over the beautiful pool, and facing the ocean steps away on the other side of the street. so i’ll take lumpy mattress + ocean over no water pressure any day.
never had an issue with wifi (knock on wood) and never stayed anywhere you couldn’t use the fridge. the cable, outlet, and thin wall issues are annoying but nowhere near issues with sleeping or showering, for me.
Regarding the ubiquitous side of the highway 2-4 story “Inn’s” - how to reliably discern whether the place is old enough or high quality enough to have either poured or pre-stressed concrete floor/ceilings.
Lacking that knowledge I insist on a top floor room to avoid the potential of wild kids tearing across the floor above at all hours of the night.
Lack of vending machines (or 24 hour pantry). What’s a matter? Pepsi machine gonna offend the aristocracy? Ordering by the glass at the hotel bar (or room service) that closes at 10:00 can’t be the only way to get a fizzy drink.
@moondrake Last place I stayed was fairly nice, but had neither of those things. 7-Eleven was literally a mile away. There was a hospital within a few blocks that had a 24-hour Subway.
Yeah, that place wasn’t typical, but I’d still really prefer something I can get to barefoot.
All of the above? All seem like good complaints!
I only use the hotel supplied internet if forced to and then only via a whole-connection VPN. Zero trust. I have a hotspot (Karma Go, though with their recent changes they are also zero trust and get the VPN treatment too) and expect to get another one once my remaining purchased time runs out on the karma.
The pillows are usually more of a problem than the mattress.
@duodec
/giphy those aren’t pillows
@duodec i always bring my own pillow
@ragingredd Sometimes I do too, especially if I’m driving to the location.
Lack of and /or placement of outlets. You shouldn’t have to plug your phone in next to the sink because that is the only outlet you can find. If you have multiple people or multiple devices the lack of outlets is terrible. But I have issues with a lot of the other options as well, except the cable tv one. That doesn’t bug me too much.
@remo28 I usually throw a compact power strip into my suitcase.
@duodec That’s what I was hoping today’s sale would be. It’s not like I can take a monitor to a hotel.
@remo28 that’s a great one. i wish more places had the nightstand lamp outlets. we were just in a hotel last weekend and there was one outlet behind the table and it didn’t even hold a plug so i had to unplug the floor lamp and use that. thankfully we brought our usb hub but that still didn’t fix the issue of wanting to use my devices while lying in bed at the end of the day. also once stayed in a place with fake outlets. that was really something.
I added a multitap extension cord with low profile plug (because the outlets are always behind something) to my travel bag years ago. But honestly, lately, most newer or refurbed hotels seem to make a pretty good effort towards providing accessible outlets. They still often fail… but I’d say it’s getting better.
I always seem to get put next to a family. The awful parents let their kids run wild until midnight and there’s at least one deprived child that will cry nonstop for an hour or two.
@FightingMongoos They were in the row behind me on the plane trip…
@FightingMongoos And the only way they seem to know how to close a door is to open it to fully and then just let go and let it slam shut.
@FightingMongoos I work front desk in a hotel. Trust me, they’re our biggest peeve as well. Zero lack of common sense regarding sharing space with others and yet we’re the bad guys when we tell them to pipe down. Which we do every damn time
Sometimes I want to bring my dog. We have to stay in a pet friendly room. 90% of the time “pet friendly” means reeking of cat pee. And I’m super allergic to cats, so even in the well cleaned rooms I have to dose up on allergy meds.
Seriously… Who brings their cat to a hotel?
@Oneroundrobb … “Cat people”… <shudder>
/giphy cat people
@Oneroundrobb Oh, so you were the one with the friggin’ dog toe nails tip-tapping on the hard floor in front of the door that connects two adjoining rooms. Wow, that was annoying. “Just friggin’ lie down already, dog!”
@Oneroundrobb i would think people that are moving maybe, or going somewhere for a long time (for the summer, etc), or foster pet parents getting an animal to a new owner and are making a pitstop.
but also probably Crazy Cat Ladies who can’t be without fluffy for even a night.
@Oneroundrobb Speaking as a crazy cat lady, WHAT THE HELL? Letting cats loose in a hotel room is cruel to them, never mind what happens to the room or subsequent guests. If they have to travel at all, they’d be MUCH happier locked in the bathroom, which is a volume of space they can conquer in the course of an overnight stay and can’t screw up too badly.
@whogots
https://shirt.woot.com/offers/kitty-treadmill?ref=meh_com
@narfcake Honestly, if you have owned more than zero cats for more than two weeks and you let them get at the toilet paper, that’s an unforced error on your part.
Top marks and many thanks for the lolcat, though. I lol’d.
@whogots No cats and I’d prefer to keep it that way.
(Catshirts are much easier to take care of.)
@medz it’s your fault for staying in a pet friendly hotel when the doggy dancing finals were in town
/giphy doggy dancing
@Oneroundrobb there was a pet product convention in town, but they scoffed and told us people don’t bring their pets. Apparently, all business and no cute animals.
bed bug uncertainty.
@InnocuousFarmer bed bug certainty.
@InnocuousFarmer http://bedbugregistry.com/
It feels like I have to get into a catcher’s crouch when I want to wash my hair in the shower. I’m only 6’2", which isn’t that abnormally tall either.
It’s always the same dead freshly dead stripper. Again and again and again, the very same one.
Always stuffed into the closet right before I get the room keys. This has been going in for decades.
Karma? Dammit. Whatever.
/giphy stripper
@f00l The stripper is always in the box spring for me.
@f00l The least they could do is gve you a new dead stripper instead of a recycled one. Next time, load the stripper into the trunk of your car so he/she can’t be refurbished and reused. Repeat at every stop. Use lots of air freshener in the trunk.
Mattress too soft. Pillows too soft. Expensive WiFi. Insufficient outlets. No night light in the bathroom (the main light is so bright I can’t go back to sleep). Fixed shower head. And now, thanks to meh, I miss my bidet.
The air conditioning unit that’s better at desiccating me than it is at cooling the room.
@SSteve And it rattles… oh how it rattles…
@SSteve never had this problem but your comment got an actual lol out of me, so,
The chocolate left on the pillow.
Oh crap, that wasn’t a chocolate.
Crappy, dingy lighting. Crappy, low-flo shower nozzle. Crappy, dingy lighting. Crappy wifi with a whopping 1.5mb d/l bandwidth. Did I mention crappy, dingy lighting?
Okay, maybe this is TMI, but you know how some people like to eat adventurously on vacation? Sometimes those people’s roommates REALLY need a bathroom fan. Hotels never have them. I swear to fucking god, the only thing that keeps me from renting a second room on those nights is the belief that bad behavior (in this case, willful omission of standard bathroom equipment) shouldn’t be rewarded.
@whogots This.
They have too much stuff in them. I don’t need a pile of magazines or any of the other stuff they pile on the desk/table/counter/wherever. My house is cluttered. That’s my fault. Please don’t preclutter my nice clean hotel room.
one time… and I’m not making this up… I found a pair of shit-stained tighty-whiteys in my hotel room closet. I suppose shit-stained isn’t a fair assessment – it was moreso an entire smashed turd. The Courtyard staff didn’t seem to believe me at first, but I made them come to the room and remove them. They comped my room, but I can’t get myself to stay at a hotel anymore. I’d rather camp…
@capguncowboy Don’t blame you. I wouldn’t have trusted any of the linens after that either.
@capguncowboy I found a dress sock in the closet once. In their defense, it sorta matched the ugly carpet, so it was camouflaged pretty well.
The obnoxiously loud A/C window unit that is always right next to the bed. One time when maintenance came to fix it, they realized it was not secured to the wall. Every single screw was missing.
When I discover the pictures I had been looking at online were only for the most expensive ones, and mine looks… different.
Outside the hotel room, the free cookie setup by the front desk never has any cookies in it.
The light that pours in around the curtains. I need total darkness to sleep. (also thinking that’s all the coffee and fixins you need)
I don’t spend a lot on hotel rooms because I just need a place to sleep, brush my teeth, and take a shower. I don’t care if it’s the most modern looking thing, has a fancy coffee machine or anything like that.
I just want it to be clean.
First thing I do is turn down the sheets and look at them. Then I’ll look at the bathroom to make sure the toilet has actually been cleaned, that there isn’t any stray hairs all over the sink and tub.
As someone mentioned above about pet friendly hotels… When I visit my grandma, there’s two hotels. One pet friendly, the other one isn’t. The pet friendly one is really old… Which isn’t normally a problem. However, the last time I stayed there, we booked two rooms. One smelled like mildew, and the other one was fine. My mom was like, “I’ll just open the door to air it out.” “Fuck no you’re not. You’re getting a different room. They can air it out and figure out why it stinks while you’re relaxed in a different room.” Turns out the wall a.c. unit was leaking water inside the room and that’s why it stunk. That’s just inconsiderate employees. If you know there is a huge problem with the room, let maintenance know so they can try to fix it, let the front desk people know so they don’t rent that room.
@RiotDemon When road tripping I stay in the cheapest motels I can find. Big sci fi conventions are usually in nice hotels like Hiltons and Marriotts. And when I buy travel packages they often include stays in upscale resorts and high end hotels that sell vacancies to aggregators who then string them together in those travel packages. I wouldn’t pay the rack rate for those luxury hotels, but they sure are nice to stay in when a package deal puts them in comfortable financial reach.
@RiotDemon @moondrake We usually try to stay in nice rooms when on vacation. The logic is we want the place to seem nicer than our own house. Otherwise, why would we bother leaving the house?
@medz to do something you want to do that isn’t near your own house, presumably
@medz what @jerk_nugget said.
I’m poor so if I go on vacation, I spend the money on the destination, not the hotel.
@RiotDemon it’s worse if the trip is ruined by a shitty room though
@medz i’ve found there’s quite a lot of room between “nicer than my own home” and “shitty”, thankfully. sometimes you just need a place to be serviceable.
@jerk_nugget Well lah-tee-dah, Mr. Fancy House.
@medz ha! that’s ms. fancy house to you
(our little attic apartment is far from fancy but it’s comfortable because it’s home. mentally comfortable, i guess you could say. maybe this is why i actually preferred our stays at middle of the road hotels vs the upscale ones where i felt a bit awkward. nothing like cringing while a valet parks or retrieves your twenty year old car or the bellhop carries your not-really-luggage bags XD)
@jerk_nugget Terribly sorry. I feel like I’ve made that mistake in the past… meh users are all androgynous to me anyway.
I NEVER do valets or bellhops. It seems like an extra inconvenience. Wait while someone gets my car. Wait while someone brings the luggage to the room. Nope. I’ve never stayed somewhere so snobby that you HAD to use valet. I think a Disney hotel (attended a conference there) forced us to do the bellhop thing because my work paid for the Disney bus to transport us from the airport. Basically, anything that got stored under the bus was to be taken direct to our room. In theory, it should get there before us since we had to check in, but no. We had to wait for it. Lame. I like to start getting settled first thing when I arrive. Only after that can I explore the resort.
@medz well, I get that… But I don’t stay at places that are full of bugs or anything.
@jerk_nugget That’s if a valet even knows how to drive stick. A lot can’t these days.
@narfcake my glob you’re right. my car isn’t a stick but i didn’t even consider that. perhaps they’ll come back into vogue like vinyl and toast.
@medz no apology necessary, i feel the same about People On The Internet.
we did stay one place where we had to valet the car, but when you’re in the city it’s kind of a necessity vs simply a luxury, if that makes sense. definitely having to wait (and having to tip) each time is…not ideal. however it was a very specific situation in which a friend had very graciously put us up in a nice hotel downtown after we had lost our last apartment. so it is absolutely NOT something i’m complaining about but also not something i would choose if we were vacationing. (although in this instance maybe it would have been fine since we wouldn’t have needed the car to do touristy things, except we were just trying to go to and from work and to apartment showings and whatever.)
@jerk_nugget 2017+ Tesla are leather free (aka vinyl). Mercedes MB-tex = vinyl. BMW SensaTec = vinyl.
@narfcake i see what you did there.
@jerk_nugget I forgot to address the toast part too.
http://jalopnik.com/5937499/the-jalopnik-guide-to-burning-supercars/
And WTF with hotel WiFi anyway? It seems as if the price of the WiFi is directly proportional to the price of the room.
That $300 a night room downtown at the Marriott? They need $13 bucks a night for the internet to work.
That $30 no-tell motel out past the airport? Free WiFi!
This makes no sense, and having used both at different times I can attest: The difference in WiFi quality ain’t that much.
(Thank God for excellent Hot Spots and Unlimited Data plans!)
@simssj I stayed in a Marriott this past weekend and the wifi was $15 a day. I stuck with cell data and left my tablet in the suitcase.
@simssj uh…not that I’m suggesting this. But call down the first night and tell the auditor the Wi-Fi isn’t doing shit and you’ve got work to get done. If your stay is a couple nights, talk to them at check out and remind them you had issues and just straight up ask them to remove the charge. Before check out tho and do it at the desk. They will, way more often than not. One router per floor means almost no chance of ever getting decent signals.
Too much mechanical noise (air conditioners, elevators, etc) between the walls making it difficult to eavesdrop on your neighbors.
Just had to check back to see who starred this comment.
Currently - the prices.
@cinoclav there’s a reason I can’t ever quit my job…kids would kill me
i was torn between the showerhead and the mattress. i prefer a detachable showerhead or at least one you can move, and of course i want decent water pressure. a few years ago we stayed in a lovely room at a best western and our stay was wonderful in every possible way…except the shower literally produced 3-5 very weak streams of water. it was horrible.
last weekend we stayed at a place where the water pressure was awesome, but the room only had a shower stall so there was nowhere to stand out of the spray of water which is a bit annoying. but worse was the mattress…i laid on it and then my partner laid down next to me and the thing was so bouncy and lumpy i actually asked in all seriousness if it was a waterbed. never encountered something like that before.
the real difference was the latter hotel room had our own balcony, was right over the beautiful pool, and facing the ocean steps away on the other side of the street. so i’ll take lumpy mattress + ocean over no water pressure any day.
never had an issue with wifi (knock on wood) and never stayed anywhere you couldn’t use the fridge. the cable, outlet, and thin wall issues are annoying but nowhere near issues with sleeping or showering, for me.
I really wanted to come on here and gripe about Wifi being the biggest problem but after reading these comments I’m laughing too hard to care.
I can live with many of the discomforts - even the hotel’s cheapass attitude about wifi.
The two things I never get comfortable about:
How likely am I to migrate the hotel’s bedbug colony to our home.
Pondering whether it is a good or bad thing I left this at home:
Regarding the ubiquitous side of the highway 2-4 story “Inn’s” - how to reliably discern whether the place is old enough or high quality enough to have either poured or pre-stressed concrete floor/ceilings.
Lacking that knowledge I insist on a top floor room to avoid the potential of wild kids tearing across the floor above at all hours of the night.
If you want to be grossed out by hotel rooms, check out this guy:
/youtube Dan bell another dirty room episode 1
Some of the episodes are so disgusting. In the more recent ones they have drug testing kits and luminol to check for blood. Fun times.
Interestingly enough, in the comments, someone left a comment about finding underwear with shit in it. I know someone mentioned that above somewhere.
Lack of vending machines (or 24 hour pantry). What’s a matter? Pepsi machine gonna offend the aristocracy? Ordering by the glass at the hotel bar (or room service) that closes at 10:00 can’t be the only way to get a fizzy drink.
@walarney yeah, but when they have machines, it’s like $3 per 20oz bottle.
@walarney There’s usually machines in either the laundry room or ice machine room.
@moondrake Last place I stayed was fairly nice, but had neither of those things. 7-Eleven was literally a mile away. There was a hospital within a few blocks that had a 24-hour Subway.
Yeah, that place wasn’t typical, but I’d still really prefer something I can get to barefoot.