UPDATE: An inside look at “America’s Dirtiest Hotel”

by Mike Barish on

A couple of weeks ago I told you about The Dirtiest Hotels in the United States. New York City’s Hotel Carter was ranked number one and the user reviews on TripAdvisor are pretty graphic. The reader comments on my post contained some fantastic stories of other horrendous hotels. However, many readers used the comments to ask Gadling to send me to the Hotel Carter for a first-hand review. Some of you even went so far as to email our editors requesting that I be sent inside the infamous hotel to see if it lived up (or down) to the hype.

Well, we heard you loud and clear. Last night, Room 812 at the Hotel Carter belonged to me. Was it a bug-infested petri dish of awfulness? Was there a dead hooker in the bathtub? Was the dead hooker hot? Stay tuned. I’ll have my full report up later this week.

Fat finger deals – should your airline or hotel honor them?

by Scott Carmichael on

A fat finger deal is the name given to airline deals where someone “with fat fingers” missed a zero, or put a comma in the wrong place when entering air or hotel prices.

The deals pop up more often than you’d think in this day and age, but airlines are starting to fight back. In recent years, some of the better fat finger deals would get you from the US to most European destinations for $20, or from LA to Fiji for just $50.

The mistakes are human, and despite all the computerized air fare systems, at the end of the day there is still someone locked away in an office who is responsible for loading the thousands of various air fare combinations into a computer terminal, and I’m sure we all know that when people get involved, something will eventually go wrong.

In the past, airlines would do one of several things;

  • Ignore the problem and let people benefit from the screw-up
  • Let people know the deal would be honored, but only on a smaller scale, hotels would let people stay a few nights instead of the months they’d often book
  • Let people take the trip AND try to benefit from all the good PR they create by honoring it

Nowadays airline are in a world of hurt, and any kind of screw-up that could cost them money has to come to an end. When passengers grab one of these fat finger deals, the airline will simply cancel it, and in most cases won’t even bother to inform them.

A natural reaction to this behavior is that the airline is perfectly within its rights to do so – it was an honest mistake, and they have page after page of fine print protecting their business practices. But there is one very simply reason why I don’t think the airlines deserve to get off easy – mistakes are not a one way street.

If you book a non refundable hotel room and made a mistake entering the date, you are screwed. If you book a ticket on the airline, but make a spelling error in your name, some airlines will charge you $90 to fix it. Airlines have perfected the art of making money off your mistakes, but when they mess up, they simply make the problem go away.

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Dirtiest Hotels in the United States

by Mike Barish on

Hotels are filthy places. As fellow Gadling blogger Scott recently told us, hotel rooms aren’t always cleaned as well as we would like. Imagine how many people have touched that television remote before you arrived. Or, for your sanity’s sake, don’t. And for the love of all that you consider holy, do not run a blacklight over your sheets and bedspread. But some hotels are filthier than others. And the folks at TripAdvisor have used reader reviews to compile their annual list of Dirtiest Hotels in the United States.

New York City (where I live) is home to two of the “top” three dirtiest hotels. Coming in at number one is the Hotel Carter and at number three is the New York Inn. The reader reviews for the Hotel Carter don’t pull any punches.

Roaches, rats, mice, horrible smells, dirty sheets, horrifying bathrooms, outlets that hang out of walls…

This hotel was the filthiest,most unsanitary place I have seen ever. From the smell when you walk into the room to the plastic wrapped around the mattresses.

There are bed bugs in this hotel and you don´t easily see these bugs, but after one night you see the bites and they itch terribly for many days!

Welcome To Hell.

It could be worse than bed bugs, though. You could find a corpse under your bed, which a housekeeper at the Hotel Carter did in 2007. The upside to this story? It proves that they have housekeepers!

Strange Hotels from Around the World


Confessions of a hotel maid – read if you dare!

by Scott Carmichael on

I’m pretty sure I won’t have to tell any of you just how unsanitary many hotel rooms are.

We’ve all heard about the exposés on TV where someone would shine a CSI style ultraviolet lamp around the bed, lighting up the kind of stains you really wish you had not known about.

MSNBC has posted an article from a former hotel housekeeping staff member – and the story may make you think twice about drinking out of the bathroom cup.

For starters, after several weeks on the job, she decided that using the vacuum was just too much work, and simply picked the worst of the crumbs off the floor by hand.

Once she learned the in’s and out’s of how the room inspector worked, she even stopped cleaning sinks and simply wiped them dry to make them appear clean. Sometimes she was not in a “scrub the tub” kind of mood, and simply did a quick spray and wipe.

Thankfully she informs us that she never skipped changing the sheets – apparently even a hotel maid has her limits as to how low she will go.

Of course, things are not just bad for the guests. The housekeeper describes an incident where someone had soiled their bed linens so badly that all the sheets had to be disposed of in a biohazard bag. Sleep well!

I wonder if the housekeeping is more attentive in any of these ultra-weird hotels:


Nazi megahotel to be converted into a youth hostel

by Scott Carmichael on

During the Second World War, the Nazi’s had many grand plans. One of their more ambitious was to build the world’s largest beach resort on the island of Rügen.

The Prora complex was not just big – it was absolutely absurdly big. So big in fact, that you can see the complex taking up the entire coastal region on this Google map link.

The main buildings are 2.7 miles long, and every single one of the almost 10,000 rooms faces the sea. The Nazi’s, and Hitler in particular wanted the resort to be where Germans would go for their well deserved beach holiday, and like many of his other plans, the place had to be “the most mighty one to ever have existed”.

The plans also included a festival hall large enough for 20,000 people, two wave pools, a theater and docks for arriving ships.

Portions of the complex were never completed, as Hitler moved troops away from the construction site to work on his V2 rocket program. After the war, the East German army used parts of the complex as a military outpost.

After the German reunification, the buildings were left completely vacant and started to rot away. For years, the complex stood empty, with only a small portion being used as an exhibit center.
Things are about to change, as the village council in Binz has voted to approve a plan to return portions of the complex into its original purpose – a tourist resort. Part of the plan also includes a youth hostel. Construction is scheduled to begin by the end of 2009. Of course, this still leaves large portions of the building vacant, but I’m sure someone will find a good use for it.

This isn’t even the only time a crazed dictator has attempted to build an insane hotel, just ask the poor people of North Korea who have to look at this unfinished monstrosity every day.

(Photo from Wikipedia)

More weird hotels: