Hotel Horror Stories

Not everyone hits the hotel jackpot when they book a foreign holiday deal. Hotels in some destinations leave us with an extremely bad taste in our mouths, and not just from the horrendous a la carte food. Having scrimped and saved during this depressing economic dark age, the last thing anyone wants is to have their holiday ruined by snooty staff, frightful fellow guests or rooms that look like something from a prison movie.

Everyone has heard these hotel horror stories from their friend’s uncle’s brother-in-law down the pub, but there’s nothing like hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak. So if you're a horse with a story, chomping at the bit to have your say, this is the place to do it. We’ll be trawling the Internet to find the murkiest depths of hotel depravity. But you can tell us your tales of woe too, and we might even offer a smidgen of sympathy. After all, we’ve all been there. Not literally there, to the hotel that you went to, that would just be weird, but you get the picture.

Not only are we your friendly hotel agony aunt, but we can also point you in the direction of hotels that don’t have cockroaches in the sinks and décor that went out with the space hopper. Visit our featured hotels section, the Kennel Klub to read about those remarkably nice places at the other end of the spectrum, where guests actually enjoy their stay and don't contract salmonella in Spain, swine flu in Switzerland or trench foot in Turkey. Some folk get all the luck!

Hotel Cuisine from Around the Globe

We all like food, some like it a bit too much judging by the rising obesity levels in the UK, but along with the Christmas period there’s one other time of year when everyone feels the freedom to let themselves go, to over-indulge and say to hell with the diet. It is of course, your summer holidays. All inclusive holidays are the prize pick for the real porkers among us, but while on the face of it all hotel restaurants are about equal in the culinary stakes, some are of course more equal than others.

On a low cost holiday the hotel food on offer in some establishments is paramount to human rights abuse. Many all inclusive hotels offer seemingly bottomless troughs of unidentifiable ‘meat’ products that you start to imagine came from some sort of hybrid feathered cow. On the other hand, there are some surprisingly good little eateries either in or near many holiday hotels, and it’s those that we’d prefer to feast on here. Tales of gastronomic gallantry from holiday hotel restaurants and the best neighbouring eateries are the focus of this section.

Hotel Staff and Guest Relations

Have you ever stayed at a hotel on holiday where you spent far too much time interacting with the hotel staff? Yes? Well join the club pal, so has everybody else! So to celebrate this great British tradition of foreign diplomacy at the hotel pool bar, we’ve compiled a collection of some of the most heart wrenching and funny stories of friendship, love, camaraderie and even hatred, just to satisfy your thirst for hotel related horseplay.

We’ve scoured literally the whole pub for the most interesting and intriguing tales from Caribbean all inclusive complexes, Spanish apartments, Turkish gulets and Egyptian hotels. Prepare to laugh, to cry, to laugh a bit more and then perhaps make a cup of tea before you continue reading. We love telling our mates about our new Spanish best friend Eduardo (the waiter in the restaurant we went to every other night), and how he was in stitches at our ‘hilarious’ attempts at ordering in Spanish and the friendly banter when we called him Eddy and laughed at his tash. But don’t stop at telling your mates, we all want to hear it. Don’t we! Don’t we?

Not only are the life changing connections we make with our foreign brothers and sisters a source of enormous entertainment in the cold light of day, we inevitably also come back with hundreds of snaps of us posing with them like a prize teddy we won at the fairground. Even worse than saying you’ll email that boring couple you met around the pool, is the cringe-worthy promise of keeping in touch with Turkish Tolan the hotel gardener, a mistake that far too many of us make under that hot foreign sun. Read about other people’s misplaced loyalties here.