9 People Share The Grossest Things They've Found In Their Hotel Rooms
"A guest had left a dead cat in the bathroom with the whole floor covered with blood."
SARYMSAKOV ANDREY / Shutterstock Ah, hotel stays. We love to get away, to stay in a beautiful room perhaps bigger and more luxe than anything we have at home. We also love to know that our room will be cleaned every day for us 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?
We asked a bunch of people to share gross things found in hotel rooms that they had the misfortune of finding. These finds may ruin your next vacation!
1. Nail clippings
"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. Human feces
"I would say the grossest thing I've found in my hotel room was a human poo that I found in the courtyard right next to the sliding door. I was staying in a motel in Cairns, Australia for business and I walked out and saw the rather delightful Mr. Hanky looking at me. Needless to say, I asked reception to come and clean it up. Glad I didn't step in it!" —Anthony of The Travel Tart: Offbeat Tales From A Travel Addict.
3. A used condom
"I was staying at a mid-range, business-casual style hotel. While preparing to get into bed for the night, I saw a used condom on the floor barely beneath the bed."
4. A dirty thong
"We once walked into our room in a hotel in LA after checking in and there was a nice thong (clearly used) sitting in between the sheets."
5. A half-eaten sandwich and a beer can
"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."
6. A dead cat
"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.
7. An open bottle of lube
"At a fancy hotel in Boston, I found a clearly opened mini bottle of lube on the floor (not hidden away, like right in front of the bed in plain view). And bobby pins were also inexplicably all over the room. I was very confused and asked to switch rooms."
8. A bird of prey
"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."
9. Period stains
"At the Four Seasons in LA, a lovely upholstered chair had period blood 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. Her work appears in dozens of digital and print publications regularly. Visit her on Twitter.