Lodging lessons: What to do when your hotel stinks

January 3, 5:23 PMDC Ireland & UK Travel ExaminerLaura Harrison McBride

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The Black Boy pub and B&B, Sudbury, Suffolk, England

You can toss and turn at home; you don’t want to be doing it on vacation. But every now and again, even frequent travelers run into awful lodging situations. Like these:

Situation 1. You decide at the last minute to visit Paris for Christmas week. None of your favorite mid-range hotels are available. You can’t afford the top range. So you look on the Internet and find one that looks reasonably like those you know and love, and you book it, online, prepaid. (Did I say Dumb, Dumb, Dumb yet? No?)

You arrive at the hotel, the Eden Magenta, at dinner time and it smells not of food, but  like the inside of a can of epoxy. This is because they have painted two stairwells five stories high with waterproof paint and haven’t vented it. At all. Ever.

You’re miserable the first night, with windows wide open. You move down a floor. A little better. But you feel queasy in the morning. They move you down another floor and FINALLY open a window at the top of the stairs.

By night three, you’re wildly sick, poisoned, chills shaking you out of the bed, spouse bringing you a sandwich from a Parisian convenience store. On day four, you leave, losing three days’ fees, and go back home where you can recover, which takes two weeks and medical care.

Lesson: Cut your losses before an environmental insult makes you a patient instead of a tourist.

Situation 2. You need to book a room in a city you’ve never visited before, and the best one in town, according to a local resident you know, is full. So you go online and pick on because it says it was featured in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers.  Cool!  Literary history. Then the local friend tells you Gainsborough’s house is right around the corner…but you hear hesitation in his voice.

Well, what the heck? How bad can it be for two nights? You could impose on your friend, but he has stepchildren staying for the holidays, and this is England. Even big houses are small.

You walk into the bar and see a set of plastic naked breasts sitting there. The patrons exiting appear to be extras in the movie The Commitments. But you take your bags upstairs. You can’t help noticing that the music is so loud you might be sitting inside the juke box.

Still, the bartender, a young woman, said the music would cease at midnight. You return from dinner at 11:30. You take a bath. You realize she lied, and there will be no sleep this night. So you go online (at least there is WiFi) and find a Travelodge 20 miles away. You pack up your stuff, tote it down the winding stairs, toss it into the car and head out at 1 in the morning on Christmas Eve. After calling the Travelodge desk clerk five times from the twisting little roads between Sudbury and Colchester, England, you finally get unlost, check in, open the window for blessedly cool QUIET air and sleep until noon, narrowly making it to the Christmas lunch with old friends unseen for 35 years that you came for in the first place.

Lesson: Don’t book a hotel on the Internet unless you vet it as well as you would vet a prospect on an Internet dating site, and for goodness sake, turn on your heel and run if there’s a plastic boob job on the bar.

Situation 3. You arrive for a much-needed vacation at a motel in Key West, The Blue Marlin, where you’ve stayed before quite happily, although not for the past seven years or so. It always had the best swimming pool on the island, and good restaurants are abundant and nearby, so its being a motel wasn’t the least annoying. Except now. Now they charge exhorbitant rates for pool towels, and the desk clerk snarls. The patrons look as if they need snarling at. Not a nice place anymore.

You decide to rebook your flight and go home. So you decide to spend the money you’ll save on a really good meal. Midway through it, you realize Key West has other hotels, and you can find one. You call Delta (needless to say, this was before the Internet took over virtually all booking) and they say you can change your flight back to its original itinerary at no charge since you didn’t actually ever pick up the changed tickets. (There WERE some good things about pre-Internet travel!)

You find a great deal at one of the island’s most desirable hotel/restaurant/bar/cabaret venues, La Te Da, and spend five blissful days, although you do miss the great motel pool. La Te Da isn’t a swimming venue, so it has a postage-stamp pool. But what the heck? One of the trendiest spots in the city for less than a bad motel, simply because they had the room still available when you walked in?  OK.

(To be fair, The Blue Marlin has once again changed management, and, when I stayed there again to find out, two years ago, it was back to its former self, and I stayed there happily once again...and still LOVED that pool.)

Lesson: Lodgings change. Be prepared to change yours if it has changed too much; have a Plan B in mind before you go, and some idea of what might be available. Be prepared to change the nature of your vacation, from wall-to-wall swimming to hanging out with the “beautiful people” for example.