Apr 23: Horrendous Hotels

I received an email not that long ago with the headline, “Ready to be Grossed Out?” It seems that Trip Advisor’s travel website was releasing their 2008 list of the dirtiest dumps (their words). This list first appeared in 2005. They put together a list of the 10 dirtiest hotels in the United States and the 10 dirtiest hotels in the United Kingdom. The top ten were chosen by Trip Advisor members based on their ratings of hotels for cleanliness.

Of the 10 hotels on the 2008 list, 3 were in New York and 3 were in Florida. The other remaining 4 (one hotel per state) were in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey.

I was sorry to see that two of the hotels were located in South Florida – the Red Carpet Inn in Fort Lauderdale and the Travel Inn Civic/Medical Center in Miami. The third Florida hotel on the list was the St. Augustine Beachfront Resort.

Our hotels should never appear on the dirty list. It’s hard enough for us to be doing our jobs just getting people to stay at our hotels in the first place. We also want to make sure that they are happy once they are here, come back again, and recommend the resort to their friends and relatives. Cleanliness shouldn’t be something we have to worry about. And we know it’s harder to fill dirty rooms than clean ones.