r/hotels

My husband and I take a lot of road trips to visit family. One place we visit is about a 11-12 hour drive, so we tend to work a half day, then drive halfway and stay overnight. So we stay in a lot of hotels. But this was something that happened recently.

Now we've stayed at this hotel previously about 8 months ago with no issues whatsoever. So no big deal to stay again. Man I wish we would've stayed anywhere else.

First issue was at check-in. I booked a king room. Front desk says their system says I booked 2 queens. I tell them that is incorrect and show them my email confirmation that clearly states a king room. Now I get it, system glitches happen and it's not the end of the world to have to stay in the room with queen beds for the night. My problem was they never apologized or even acknowledged that my email stated a king room. They just keep saying I was wrong and I hadn't booked what I said I booked. Well they have no king rooms available. so I'm like fine just give me the room with the queens and we'll deal with it. It was like 7pm and we'd driven 6 hours and just wanted to get checked in so we could get dinner. At that point another employee states that he will upgrade us to the king suite. Now this is a very basic 2/3-star hotel - not to sound uppity or anything - just want to know we didn't get anything super fancy here (it was about $10 more for the night). I tell him thank you and we get checked in and head to dinner. Oddly enough, they never asked for an ID or a credit card which is normally pretty standard at check-in.

After dinner we are relaxing in our room. At about 10:45-11pm I decide to go to bed while my husband decided to stay up a bit longer to finish the movie we were watching. Shortly after I go to bed (hadn't even fallen asleep yet), a buzzer starts going off and then the room phone rings. I'm like who is calling our room at like 11pm. Next thing I know I hear knocking at the door. I go to see what's going on and it is two front desk employees - a male and female - accusing us of smoking in our room. We were not smoking. I don't even smoke, and while my husband does, he never smokes inside ever. We say we were not smoking and point out that there is no visible smoke in the room, no cigarette butts or ashes or any signs of smoking at all besides them saying they "smelled smoke". Then the female employee states we must have been vaping then. Nope, we don't even have a vape. They make us go downstairs to the front desk to discuss it because they don't want to argue in the hallway. They were both being so rude and aggressive and really disrespectful.

We go down to the front desk - let me note that we are both in our pajamas - and the male employee says they have a sensor in the room that said we were smoking. My husband states again that he was not smoking in the room and that he has literally walked past the front desk multiple times to go outside the front of the hotel to smoke. The male employee says that their system is very sensitive and it showed we were smoking and that we have to give them a credit card and pay the $250 smoking fee or we have to leave the hotel immediately. I was so tired and nearly in tears and under so much stress that I figured we would just pay it. Neither of us had a wallet on us - as I said I was in my pajamas - so I head upstairs back to the room to get my wallet.

As I am coming back downstairs, the elevator doors open on the first floor to the female employee and a police officer. Yes ladies and gentlemen, they called the cops on us. I had to take the officer to our room to prove that nothing was on fire. My husband was still downstairs and told me that another officer was there with a prybar and a mallet. Not sure what that was for - certainly no need to force themselves into our room. While in the room I once again point out that there are no signs of anyone smoking in the room - other than the employee insisting you could smell it. My husband had just come back to the room from smoking downstairs when all of this began so that's the only thing I can think of that she supposedly smelled or that might've set the system off. I've read that those systems can be very inaccurate and give false positives quite often (even that the steam from the shower can set them off).

We get back downstairs and the cops leave. They genuinely seemed baffled that they were even there in the first place. They never asked for our ID or anything or gave us any kind of a hard time. The employees were still insisting that we were smoking, showing some kind of screenshot/photo on his phone which was supposedly their system indicating that someone was smoking. They again said that we had to pay $250 or leave immediately. Had it been earlier in the evening, we probably would've just left and went to a different hotel. But it was nearly midnight at this point, we were both tired and stressed and had another 6-hour drive in front of us the next day. So, I just gave them my card, they charged us, then we went back to bed. The man also mentioned multiple times how we had booked the room with points. Not sure how that is relevant - I mean that is the reason you become a rewards member. He also mentioned how they upgraded out room. Not sure if the disagreement when we checked-in precipitated this - if we were targeted in some way.

I had a hard time falling asleep after all of that but finally managed at some point. Then at 5am we were both woken up but that alarm buzzer going off again. It wasn't our room (we were both asleep anyway), but I was still shaken that they were going to be back knocking on our door again that I couldn't fall back asleep. Instead I just got up to shower and soon after, when my husband got up, we just immediately packed up our stuff and left. We just felt so unwelcome that we wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

I wrote all this up and sent the information to the hotel chain corporate to complain. They opened an incident and said they would talk to the hotel owner/management, but that the hotels are all pretty much independently owned and operated so there was nothing they could do about the charge. I really feel like it was kind of a scam which is why they wanted it charged separately and not on our invoice for our hotel stay. I also got the standard response that this isn't the level of service that they want to provide, blah, blah, blah.

When we got to our destination, I also filed a dispute with the credit card company for the charge. The agent I spoke to said she felt we had a good case to get a refund. Fingers crossed that we do get the money back. Needless to say, we never plan on staying at that hotel ever again. I'm also plan on writing a negative review to warn other people. I just want to wait until we find out what happens with the charge first. The hotel has 30 days to respond.

People who work front desk / adjacent roles. How do you memorise restaurants or otherwise respond to this request to recommend somewhere to eat, or a bar?

It comes up from time to time and for context the hotel I work at is on the outskirts of a touristic UK city. I do not make “going out to eat” money!! Especially with how expensive it is in the city. Some of these guests seem to want a personalised recommendation and to ask what the place is actually like. I can memorise a few places that my colleagues have shared but I don’t have personal experience to relate. What do you do to respond to this?

I’ve been noticing something lately and wanted to ask people actually working in hotels.

More and more travelers seem to skip Google entirely and just ask AI:

“Where should I stay in [city]?”

“Best boutique hotel nearby?”

Out of curiosity, I tried this with a few different AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini).

What surprised me is that the results weren’t always the same as Google rankings or even review scores.

Some hotels kept showing up consistently.

Others — including well-rated ones — didn’t show up at all.

Which made me think:

Are we entering a phase where visibility isn’t just about SEO or OTA rankings anymore, but also about how AI “understands” and recommends your property?

For those of you managing or marketing hotels:

– Have you tested how your hotel appears in AI answers?

– Have you noticed any impact on bookings or discovery channels?

I ended up building a small tool just to check this across different AI platforms, mostly out of curiosity.

If anyone’s interested, I can run a few checks and share what I see — I’m genuinely curious how this looks across different properties.

Hi,

I have a night at the Marriott (can be for any Marriott brand hotel) that is expiring on 4/7. We are no longer able to travel. We were planning to go to Indy. Please feel free to pm me if you or someone you know needs something for tonight or tomorrow night. Thank you!

I work in IT for a private hotel, and honestly, keeping track of devices gets messy fast.

It’s not just laptops, we’ve got front desk PCs, housekeeping tablets, POS devices, backup phones, printers, and random spare equipment constantly moving around. Once devices start getting reassigned or staff changes happen, spreadsheets become a pain. I’m trying to find a better way to keep inventory clean and easy to manage, something that helps track,

• who has what
• what department it belongs to
• what’s active, spare, or broken
• what’s missing or just sitting in storage

any tips, tools, or simple systems that actually work in a hotel setup?

I basically live in a hotel. I stay for work weeks at a time, 80 nights total this year. This is a Cambria Hotel and I like the location. My first stay was in a room they won’t give me again despite my status. I’m staying on a corporate rate. I’ve politely asked for the room, but they put me across the hall. That room just sits empty most of the time. Is there a trick to getting upgrades/requests?

Hi!

I have been to a couple of 5 star hotels, and booked Taj Dal View and The Khyber for next week.

Here’s the thing, I have very little experience of 5 star living lol, and have a few questions:

- How do you use the pool? Do you call the room service and reserve a spot? Do you pay extra?

- What services in any 5 Star properties are free of cost and what are chargeable, and what expriences should I go for if I’m just starting out.

- What are the etiquettes of trying out different properties, can I roam around and what areas/spaces should not be tread.

I could really use some help here. Thanks!

I work front desk and I was wondering if anybody else encountered this. I called Expedia to ask about a virtual card not processing for a cancelation. Basically my system had a different rule verses what was on the extranet. Before

I could find the rule on the extranet the agent told me to hold down Control + Alt. A code. Popped up on the screen and the agent had access to my computer screen. I immediately closed out of the browser. The agent told me

He only had access to that web browser and nothing else. Is this normal? I’ve been working the desk 8 years and this is the first time it’s happened.

We booked a Hilton hotel through hotels.com, and it was the most disgusting room I'd ever stayed in. I travel a lot and have stayed in many, many hotels — for work and for leisure. I've never had an experience like this.

The mattress on the pullout sofa had a large mysterious brown stain all over it. One of the pillows had a huge (bright) red stain all over it.

We found some nasty looking stains and food from previous guests all over the floor — pizza crusts, chips, crumbs, whole ass gummy bears and other candy.

We complained multiple times while there, they showed us other rooms that were equally filthy (one even smelled like moldy socks), but they said they couldn't refund us if we left early because we'd booked through hotels.com (even though they seemed open to it).

But when we called hotels.com's customer service they said they would just look into it. Hilton then straight up lied and said we'd never let the front desk know about it.

We provided photos of the room and names of staff we'd spoken to in our complaint. They still sided with Hilton. So I'm out hundreds of dollars.

Never booking a hotel through a third party site again. Such a fucking nightmare.

EDIT: I am posting this as a heads up/reminder of why booking third party can be a terrible idea. I've never dealt with the drawbacks until now or even been aware of them.

I’ve been working on some automations for one of the Radissons in my hotel. The automation is very simple and took my developers around 5 days to build. But the amount of time they have taken to implement it is actually insane. We were supposed to have it live back in November. And we’ve just been having meetings on top of meetings explaining the same thing over and over again just to different people. Everything is happening except the actual payment for us to push it live. At this point I don’t understand why they even want the automation if they’re not adopting it. It makes no sense at all to be delaying so much. The only reason I’m still here is so that I can add radisson to my client list. There’s too many people that call the shots and it’s too hierarchical for any saas company to work with. Would not recommend.

Avoid booking from agoda.com

I recently booked a luxurious stay from agoda.com

But when i went to that place with my family.

It had a graveyard nearby.

Hotel was in an isolated environment and in jungle.

There was no security

Staff was very rude and impolite.

Food had stinky smell

On the initial listing on agoda, hotel mentioned that there will be internet access, but upon going there we were denied by the staff that they don’t have a wifi and there was no phone signal too :)

I immediately moved out of that hotel as it was not safe and not worth the money

Agoda marked all of my proofs as invalid and they also denied to provide refund

These motherfuckers are simply scammers

Never ever book with agoda.

Shitty website and app.

Looking for a good hotel for a good price near Disney. Last time we went we stayed at the resort which was great with the shuttle, got ubers everywhere, just didn’t really plan and save like we could’ve. It was kinda on a whim we only had a few days to plan so this time I was to plan. This time we are trying to be more. Conscience with money more and also think having a hotel that comes with a hot breakfast would be great. Looking for a hotel that has a good price, great reviews,hot breakfast, and near Disney. It doesn’t have to be real close like last time since won’t have shuttle and renting a car this time anyways. Also any tips for Orlando would be much appreciated. Oh going to done possibly stopping by universal for the Mario thing. TIA