9 Travelers Share The Most Disgusting Thing They’ve Ever Found In A Hotel Room
It might be wise to stay at a friend's when vacationing.
Igor' Andrievich | Canva Ah, hotel stays. We love to get away, to stay in a beautiful room, perhaps bigger and more luxurious than anything we have at home. We also appreciate knowing that our room will be cleaned daily as part of the experience. But sometimes that experience isn't remotely as wonderful as we hope and expect it to be.
In 2017, management company Qualtrics surveyed 1,000 recent hotel guests, ranking horror stories they experienced. As a result, it found that nearly 1 in 5 guests say their hotel experience was so bad it ruined their vacation. The results of gross things found in hotel rooms were pretty disgusting. Of those surveyed, 12 percent found bodily fluids on the sheets in their hotel room, 9% percent said their room was haunted, and for 66 percent of them, it was a dirty room that ruined their stay. So, just how gross can rooms be?
Here, 5 travelers share the most disgusting thing they’ve ever found in a hotel room:
1. Nail clippings
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"Some years ago, we had a contract with a hotel which included the cleaning of all hotel rooms for one season. So, when performing the weekly cleaning in one of the rooms, I stumbled upon a pile of nail clippings.
It was all over the place — on the desks, in the drawers, there were even some stuck in the carpet! This was shocking, at least for me, and it is the grossest thing I've ever experienced in my life."
— Harriet Jones, a cleaning and maintenance expert for Go Cleaners London
2. A half-eaten sandwich and a beer can
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"An empty beer can and half a sandwich in the mini-fridge at the nicest hotel in Augusta, GA. Which isn't saying much, but still it was gnarly."
3. A dead cat
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"A few years back, when I was working as a maid in a small hotel in Southampton, I saw the most horrifying thing I've ever encountered in my entire career in the cleaning business.
A guest had left a dead cat in the bathroom, with the whole floor covered with blood. I didn't know how and why that happened, but the view was really awful."
— Lauren Haynes, cleaning supervisor at Star Domestic Cleaners
4. A bird of prey
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"I was at a nice resort in Park City, and one guest found a dead mouse on the balcony. Later that night I left the doors open — no bugs at 7,000 feet — and in flew a bird that was as scared as I was when I woke up and discovered it sitting on my headboard after a night of drinking. Poor thing didn't know what it was in for as I ran around the room with a pillow trying to get it to leave."
5. Stains
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"At the Four Seasons in LA, a lovely upholstered chair had red stains on the cushion. When I tried to flip the cushion over, there were food stains on the other side. This was years ago when I was an editor at InStyle and we all flew in for the Golden Globes."
Aly Walansky is a NY-based lifestyle writer who focuses on health, wellness, and relationships. Her work appears in dozens of digital and print publications regularly.
