There was a dead cockroach in my gin and tonic.
March 30, 2013 10:56 AM   Subscribe

Trip Avisaargh - a tumblr collection of links the best (worst?) and most memorable reviews on the travel site Trip Advisor. Sales Pitches! Statues! Manager responses! (more!) It can't get worse! Mr. Toilet House! Bonny Old London! Palaces!
posted by The Whelk (39 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
the room they gave us had old Fred urine all over the bathroom floor and walls!!

They were probably mad 'cause they'd been promised new Barney urine ...
posted by DingoMutt at 11:45 AM on March 30, 2013


I just went looking for the most memorable tripadviser review I have ever seen, from a woman who tried to leave the B&B early, only to find the owner spreadeagled across the car bonnet in an attempt to stop her.

I found it only because he told the story, in tones of outrage, when I stayed there myself. Charming man, but could not understand why guests might object to pubic hairs in the bathtub and similar little problems.

However, that seems to have shut down. So here is a report from the second worst B&B in Winchester:

Just returned from two days. Stayed for my Husband's birthday which was totally spoilt because of the bad experience of this place. Stayed out all day walking the streets rather than going back. Freezing cold, dirty, no facilities such as soap, had to ask for toilet paper. We went to bed with more clothes on than when we went out.Toilet lock kept jamming. Nowhere to hang clothes. Had a junk cupboard in our room which had an old duvet with blood on it! Net curtains stinking of dirt and dust. Window frames filty. We came away feeling dirty and itchy! The mattresses had coiled springs digging in your back all night. As for the cold breakfast! Don't even go there! We looked in a fridge and there was something growing in it! Black mould all over the door, obviously not been cleaned for months. We have since discovered that the Hotel Inspectors were there last year - they obviously haven't made any difference. Everyone in Winchester seems to know about it. We didn't expect the Ritz but you do expect the basic comforts for £50 a night. Didn't even venture into the Pub. STAY CLEAR!!!
Room Tip: No room will be any good

posted by alloneword at 12:20 PM on March 30, 2013


I read a beauty from Trip Advisor a while back:

Pros: Lovely staff, clean, great food, reasonably priced, fabulous location.

Cons: The spiders.
posted by colie at 12:28 PM on March 30, 2013 [5 favorites]


You should only go if you like butterflies and want to see them up close. Otherwise a real waste of time and money.
posted by box at 12:33 PM on March 30, 2013 [5 favorites]


when we went out onto the balcony, we were attacked by a beehive.
posted by pont at 12:35 PM on March 30, 2013 [3 favorites]


TOO MANY SPANISH. Stayed at the bali in february 2013 it was our first time in this hotel and will be our last the hotel is basically taken over by the spanish who have to be in front of you all the time they are very ignorant and no manners at all. the waiters bar staff all lean to the spanish yes fne it is there country we learnt a little spanish to get us by but what about the people who dont?
posted by Infinite Jest at 12:49 PM on March 30, 2013 [8 favorites]


I can't see the masturbating man in the photo... is this a Where's Willy kind of thing?
posted by Leon at 12:53 PM on March 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


I was able to keep it to smiling until I read The Manager Response. I'm sure it is bad for my health to laugh that much.
posted by bearwife at 1:01 PM on March 30, 2013


Cake and a wank? Sounds lovely!
posted by amanda at 1:12 PM on March 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


the room they gave us had old Fred urine all over the bathroom floor and walls!!

Fucking Fred. Every time, man, every time.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 1:31 PM on March 30, 2013


Wow, there's this whole subgenre of "we went to Spain, but it was full of Spanish people and Spanish food, ewwww" (or occasionally the same for Turkey). Favourite so far is
... be prepared to be treated like we are the foreigners!!
posted by pont at 1:56 PM on March 30, 2013 [8 favorites]


Communal toilets were horrible, everytime I went in there was a toilet otter staring at me.

Damn otters, you give them some water and next you know they have turned your toilet into a new ecological niche.
posted by Iosephus at 2:02 PM on March 30, 2013 [7 favorites]


I would like a toilet otter please. Failing that, some sort of shower otter would suffice.
posted by arcticseal at 2:22 PM on March 30, 2013 [6 favorites]


Also: I will never stop being amazed at the many whiny tourists complaining that things aren't exactly like back home. Effing dimbulbs.
posted by Iosephus at 2:26 PM on March 30, 2013


The phrase "toilet otter" made my afternoon.

Can't help but notice how many of these are British hotels. Maybe that's because, say, the guy who has the tumblr is from the UK, but . . . Well, my one experience in a British hotel would have fit in pretty well here. I recall one waiter trading verbal abuse with his supervisor right in the middle of the floor, calling him a "fucking anus." That was the Royal National in London, which now rates a solid "average" on TripAdvisor, although there are no less than 580 "terrible" reviews.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:37 PM on March 30, 2013


toilet otter

Oh god, I just spit out my drink. I can figure out the euphemism, but the thought of actual otters in the toilets delights me to no end.

Cons: The spiders.

This summarizes how I felt my first year in California. Yes, I moved from Texas, where we had 2" cockroaches and garter snakes came in under the bad weatherproofing under the front door and there were brown recluses in the shed and I had pantry moths, but every time I walked into my own bathroom here it felt like Cheers, except it was spiders and they all went "LYYYYYYYYYN!" every time I turned on the light.
posted by Lyn Never at 2:45 PM on March 30, 2013 [6 favorites]


Damn norm spiders
posted by wheelieman at 2:49 PM on March 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


The bus driver was very friendly and even pulled over and showed me a dead badger when I said I had never seen one before. Ron, the parking attendant gave me a scone his wife made. These people made up for the others, but I doubt if they are still there.
posted by Acheman at 3:04 PM on March 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


I am genuinely sorry that you have not enjoyed your stay. However I hope readers will agree that it is unfair for people to be able to complain just because they have been asked to stop singing Stayin’ Alive at the top of their voices at 3am. - Manager

Ha!!
posted by zarq at 3:04 PM on March 30, 2013 [3 favorites]


The shower was dirtier and more decrepit than one in Auchwitz and that [one] was free.
posted by applemeat at 4:42 PM on March 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


NO!

Noooo! I WON'T HAVE THAT!

There's a place in Eastbourne...
posted by ShutterBun at 6:39 PM on March 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


Wow. I had no idea so many people hated Spanish food, Spanish children and Spanish people. Why do so many reviews complain about "the Spanish?"
posted by 26.2 at 6:48 PM on March 30, 2013



And then the DJ started playing. He sang over the music, then kept disappearing for long periods leaving background music on, only to reappear wreaking of cigarette smoke. When people inevitably complained, he shoved a bridesmaid, only to claim he’d been assaulted by her (a girl half his size). He managed to top the night off by throwing a bacon sandwich at the bride in front of about twenty witnesses - Neil P



A perfectly legitimate complaint, but also kind of amusing. The rest of them just made me kinda bummed out... because people are so woefully effing entitled that they think everyone in Spain should speak Spanish and serve English food, or keep their pizza joint secured from potential pedophiles somehow. WTF. Also I am never staying in Newcastle.


I wish we hadn’t gone. The meal was ruined by midgets everywhere and we were sitting inside. We even moved tables (nearer the back wall) but we were either followed by them or they were at that table too.

Okay, that one was funny too.
posted by oneirodynia at 7:19 PM on March 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


Pros: toilet otters.
Cons: toilet-otter spiders.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:07 PM on March 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


Maybe that's because, say, the guy who has the tumblr is from the UK

The lady with the tumblr!
posted by The Whelk at 8:17 PM on March 30, 2013


Wow. I had no idea so many people hated Spanish food, Spanish children and Spanish people. Why do so many reviews complain about "the Spanish?"

And why would they vacation in Spain?
posted by empath at 8:42 PM on March 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


Well if they're Brits then they want to see what the sun looks like before they die.
posted by The Whelk at 8:59 PM on March 30, 2013 [13 favorites]


DingoMutt: "the room they gave us had old Fred urine all over the bathroom floor and walls!!"

I just want to reassure anyone who knows me/us that the Fred in question is not my cat. She is very fussy about where her urine ends up, old or new, and would never waste it on some grungy bathroom.
posted by Superplin at 9:08 PM on March 30, 2013


A friend of mine stayed at a motel in Florida while working on an archaeological excavation. It was apparently dingy, but functional, until one morning she got up and didn't turn on the lights so as not to wake up her roommate, and went about her business making lunch and getting her stuff together. Until she noticed that the floor felt a little wet. And then she turned on the lights, and realized the floor was literally swarming with maggots.

The moral of the story is that it could always get worse.
posted by ChuraChura at 9:31 PM on March 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


The moral of the story is that it could always get worse

Let's say you visit your Aunt in Florida, and you're sleeping in her trailer, and in the middle of the night you get up and walk to the bathroom, and it sounds and feels a bit like the floor is covered with Chex Mix.

Don't turn on the light. It's best to leave that blurry half-awake memory where it lies.
posted by zippy at 10:05 PM on March 30, 2013


When we checked in, our writing desk was unclean and we discovered jam on our passports

They should consider themselved lucky they weren't charged for the jam.
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 11:02 PM on March 30, 2013


Ah, they must have gone to the jam and clang area of Stuttgart...
posted by sodium lights the horizon at 1:31 AM on March 31, 2013 [1 favorite]


I ate a spider, scorpion, silkworm, and topped it off with a bowl of pigs stomach soup. I debated the various assortment of testicles and other organ meats but just couldn’t get there.


There are so many testicles, it's difficult to choose, really.
posted by louche mustachio at 1:43 AM on March 31, 2013


the mini fridge but it stunk so bad, it smelled like dead cat smothered in ball sweat.


WHY DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT SMELLS LIKE
posted by louche mustachio at 1:44 AM on March 31, 2013 [2 favorites]


Liked location disliked masturbating man

Oh, but he liked you.
posted by louche mustachio at 1:47 AM on March 31, 2013 [2 favorites]


Oh, Christ, zippy, I managed to get through all this without freaking out about my upcoming trip, and now you've gone and done it. Jesus, that's going to haunt me forever.
posted by emcat8 at 1:25 PM on March 31, 2013 [1 favorite]


The restaurant full of biting midgets is the best.
posted by medusa at 11:19 PM on March 31, 2013


wheelieman: "Damn norm spiders"

"How are the chelicerae, Mr. Peterson?"
posted by Chrysostom at 11:43 AM on April 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


The worst hotel I stayed at was in Rio Dulce, Guatemala. I had tagged along on a tour of Tikhal with a bunch of premed students I met on Lake Atitlan, and we ended up staying later than we had intended to, showing up in town on the way back after sundown, which is generally a bad idea, because everything closes early in most towns, and Rio Dulce isn't the kind of town you want wander around in at night with a bunch of twenty year old girls from Southern California. All of the places that had good recommendations from lonely planet were booked up, so we ended up staying in some random hotel with a Chinese restaurant attached to it. You can never tell in Guatemala if a place is expanding, or if they ran out of money halfway through building because every other house or building there has concrete and rebar sticking out everywhere, but in any case, the second floor was more or less open to the elements, except for the one hallway where our rooms were. It was rainy season, and without a roof, that basically meant walking through standing rivers of water that flowed down the hallway and over the balcony and also a bit under the doors into our rooms. The Vietnamese kid that I was bunking with had a bug phobia so insisted on looking under the mattresses and so on, which, to me would have been a grand idea before we checked in, but after we were stuck at a place, became, "I'd rather not know" territory.

It quickly became clear that the place was bug infested, but a least it appeared that they had set off some kind of bug neutron bomb right before we had gotten there, because the place was strewn with bug corpses everywhere we looked, but no live specimens that we could find. So, sweeping the corpses into a corner of the room as best we could, we set upon trying to find some food-- again keeping in mind that everything closes at sun down.

Our drivers discovered that there was supposed to be a pizza place open, so me and a couple of other guys went with them to try and find it. Unfortunately, the nightly torrential downpour kicked in right as we left, which quickly reduced visibility to zero, and everyone seemed to have fled the streets so we couldn't ask for directions. We attempted to turn around, but I guess our drivers, being from the highlands, didn't forsee that driving a van off road through river mud during a monsoon wouldn't end well, so we quickly got stuck.

It was pitch black, but I could see, if I looked out the window, mud flowing past us like water, and our van inching further away from the street and towards the river if it moved at all. We tried jumping up and down in the back to give it traction, but that seemed to only dig us deeper. Eventually there was a knock on the back door, and we cautiously opened it to see three shirtless Guatemalan guys waving us out. They were carrying huge rocks. Which they put underneath the tires for traction, then helped us push the van back onto the road. Some money and thanks then changing hands, we headed back to the hotel, stopping at the one fried chicken place on the main road that seemed to be still open, and bought everything they had left to bring to the hotel, where I ate what was probably the best lukewarm chicken I've ever had.

Later that night, I woke up with a half dead bee crawling around in my ear, then discovered that there had been a few more living inside my pillow case. I calmly flicked it out and fell right back to sleep.
posted by empath at 12:17 PM on April 1, 2013 [3 favorites]


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