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How to Choose a Hotel Room

Kelly’s Rules for Choosing a Hotel Room

In our short time of traveling, there are many things that have become apparent. When you are looking for a hotel and you look at the room, you need to do more than flick the lights on and off.

*Most Important Rule*
Don’t trust anything. If the room LOOKS ok from a glance, there can be tons of things wrong. You need to test everything. Don’t ASSUME because there can be things that are broken that you wouldn’t imagine.

* Feel the bed. I LOVE hard beds, but there are some that actually hurt me. I swear, they weren’t even mattresses.
* Look under the sheets. You have heard of people getting bug bites from their beds.
* Look for bugs and mosquitos. They aren’t easy to spot but if there are tons, you may be able to tell. If you see blobs on the wall, you know other people have been killing bugs in there for a while.
* LOOK IN CORNERS. Very important. Look for spider webs in ceiling corners and dust bunnies in floor corners. In the bathroom look for general cleanliness in corners.
* Check the lighting. I don’t just mean if they work, but if they are adequate. One hotel’s bathroom light was so poor I couldn’t even see my face in the mirror.
* Turn the A/C on to see if it works.
* CHECK THE HOT WATER. It almost every place we have gone, I had trouble with the hot water. One place turned out to not have hot water. Atleast two others I had to have hotel staff come and show me how to turn it on/actually fix the hot water. In all the others Jim and I had to figure out how to work it.
* Take a big whiff. Inhald deeply the aroma of the room, the bathroom, and the hotel grounds. I’ve told you before that Thailand can really stink, and we’ve had some rooms that smelled like sewer, including a very nice and expensive one. Also smell for musty, mildewy smell that is nasty.
* Find out what floor it is on. Many of these hotels don’t have elevators and do you really want to have to climb 5 flights of steep stairs with your huge backpack on? Or barefoot? (If it’s a place where they make you remove your shoes.)

I’m sure I’ll update this again as time passes.



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3 responses to “How to Choose a Hotel Room”

  1. don says:

    KO,
    the hotel room check is good fodder for the book. Don’t lose it. I had a room in Cleveland once that had dog hair in one bed, and blonde hair in the other. I didn’t notice it for five days, as I got in late every night. I was annoyed off.

  2. kelly says:

    Ew. There was a public hair on the shampoo bottle yesterday. I did mention that I ate Pringles off the floor, right??

  3. don says:

    At least you didn’t eat them off the shampoo bottle!