My friend Brian, who writes The Gate blog on Boarding Area, recently had quite a stay at an EconoLodge in Mississippi. Is Choice Hotels really so desperate for properties that it would allow a horribly nasty hotel to remain in its portfolio?
Rat Traps, Mold, Blood Stains, Hair – Just Another Night At EconoLodge?
In short, Brian checked into the hotel and found the following in his room:
- Door scratched and filthy
- Walls covered with filth and scuff marks
- Dresser drawers dirty, including hair
- Mini-refrigerator vandalized
- Dried blood on bed
- Coffee machine caked with dust
- Loose mirror above sink
- Bathroom walls covered in mold
He went down to the front desk to complain. The night manager was apologetic and assigned him a new room. But the new room had:
- A broken lock
- Paint splotches on ceiling
- Cigarette burns on carpet
- Hair all over
- Cigarette burns on sheets
- Strange gray substance in the bathtub
- Rat traps outside
You should check out his initial article and follow-up article for pictures from his stay and details about how:
- A Hotel Property So Disgusting, I Spent the Night in a Rental Car
- Blood Stains, Mold, Rat Trap — Response and Compensation: Do You Think It Is Fair?
Brian left the property and slept in his car, noting all other hotels in the vicinity were sold out.
He complained to Choice Hotels and was sent an apology as well as the 8,000 points back that he had redeemed for the room. He pushed back that a simple refund did not make him whole and was awarded 4,000 more points.
It’s really quite shocking. I’ve stayed in some nasty hotels over the years during my worldwide travels, but never at a branded chain motel with such deplorable hygiene standards.
This is quite perplexing. Are Brian’s photographs not enough to send alarm bells ringing at Choice Hotels or is this simply business as normal for some budget hotels? Shouldn’t a property like that be suspended immediately for gross violations of the franchisee contract? Is this sort of thing normal at the cheapest hotels or did Brian just pick a bad one (perhaps indicative by the fact that it was the only hotel in a 25-mile radius with vacancy)? The stock photos from the hotel website look like a very different (and much nicer) motel.
CONCLUSION
What a repulsive motel. I hope that Choice Hotels will do more than send a form letter response to Brian, but will actually start to audit properties like this one and realize that a wider footprint of motels like this will do the brand no good.
image: Choice Hotels
It’s actually impressive how dirty some of these chain hotels are. I remember back when Dan Bell was still doing Another Dirty Room they did a Days Inn and they found some pretty bad stuff: https://youtu.be/ZFJMIt5xrLo. Just, weird what goes on at these low cost motels
I don’t think there’s much in the way of brand standards for Econo Lodge, Rodeway Inn, and maybe a few others. It’s pretty much up to the owner to determine how much they care. In another life, I spent a fair amount of time at both brands. Most guests at the hotel more or less live there, so housekeeping doesn’t really serve the same purpose it does at more respectable chains.
With brands like this in their portfolio, Choice will never be a real player. I feel bad for the Nordic visitors to the USA that innocently redeem their points at these dumps expecting the standards they’re used to at Choice properties in Northern Europe.
I guess he didn’t look at the rating as it has a poor rating …..I stay at a lot of choice hotels and also book at least a 4.0 or higher rating
I think that’s perfectly in line with my expectations of any hotel in Colombus, MS. If for any reason I had any business there I would probably stay somewhere like Memphis and get up early to drive… then look for a new job that didn’t send me to Mississippi.
Many Rodeway Inns (Choice Hotel brand) are beat up but the one in the Upper West Side in New York City is not. I stayed there more than once. It neighborhood is not dangerous. Yet…
https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160329/upper-west-side/upper-west-siders-want-hellhole-hotel-shuttered-after-string-of-crimes/
Upper West Siders Want ‘Hellhole’ Hotel Shuttered After String of Crimes
UPPER WEST SIDE — Local residents are demanding the closure of a neighborhood hotel that’s been the site of a series of violent crimes in the past year — including a homicide, rape and armed robbery …On June 9, 2015, 41-year-old Paul Dawson was found dead in one of the hotel’s rooms covered in plastic wrap after using the online service rentboy.com to hire two male prostitutes, Holley said. “During the course of narcotics usage and some sort of S&M, he passed away,” he said. The prostitutes called the hotel’s assistant manager and reported the death
Good news. It is no longer a Rodeway Inn. It is a La Quinta.
Old saying “You get what you pay for.”
Folks, it is Mississippi – the entire state is like this. In USN&WR Rankings of the 50 states:
50th in Healthcare
49th Economically
48th in Infrastructure
44th in Opportunity
43rd in Education
Nope, just more Cow lovers looking to exploit Americans.
That said, we do have a lot of Americans suffering under Biden still looking to take a vacation and are willing to stay in these 3rd world shithole places they have managed to bring to America.
You probably will hate to know that these 3rd world country Cow Lovers also manage to run Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, Twitter, and dozens of fortune 500 companies which you have to depend on every min to run your life.
I’ve stayed in more EconoLodge-esque places than I want to – usually not by any choice, but because it’s the only option on a long roadtrip for a quick 5-6 hour stopover.
They’re usually run-down, a little gross at times, but nowhere near what he saw. That should be shut down and demolished by health inspectors, let alone Choice themselves.
This has been a story since TripAdvisor did their 10 worst hotels 20 years ago. Low end chains are more than willing to take the franchise money from these Indian run hotels. The dot heads that run them take and never reinvest in them until the accreditation is removed and then they go independent.
Nothing to see here.
When I worked for hotels in the Best Western and Quality Courts (now Quality Inn), they had periodic inspections, announced and non-announced, and they would yank the brand if they failed.
Dave Edwards –Yes!!!
Econo lodge not the best ever. When our daughters were on a crew team we had to stay at one.. the sheets were dirty but I had blankets in the car so used them! Called the desk for clean sheets told could not leave the office.
Nah. They just don’t care. After all, with so much consolidation where else will you go?
I worked at the Baymont Inn which is a Wyndham hotel, (owned by Indians) and then it was bought out with new owners (also Indians) that switched the hotel over to a Choice Hotel, and I can honestly say that neither owner nor brand actually cared about the quality of the hotel. We had terrible reviews and multiple guests refuse to stay at our property and that didn’t seem to bother the owners whatsoever. If a guest didn’t like something about the room they wouldn’t move them because they would have to pay $2.50 to have a housekeeper clean that room and Lord knows that could break their banks. So they wouldn’t give the guest an option to change to another room(not that it would help) so the guests would have to stick it out with the mold or the leaking toilet or broken fridge etc. Or they could leave without a refund and pay for another hotel room down the way but it really didn’t matter to them..it really made working at the front desk terrible and stressful because we knew the quality and we hated we couldn’t do anything to fix it but no one was willing to invest in the property to fix the problems. If I could have afforded it I definitely would have though because it wasn’t a total dump it just needed some attention and a owner to care about what they were selling.
Does Econolodge have any brand standards? I don’t think so, seems par for the course with Econolodge. I doubt that they will remove the franchise so long as the property is paying the franchise fees. Brain’s expectations of Econolodge weren’t reasonable. Now he knows what to expect and next time decide ahead of time if he wants to sleep in his car, drive until he can get to a better flag, or needs a room and shower badly enough that he will accept what Econolodge promises and delivers. There’s a reason their rooms are cheap and the last ones left.
Why in the world would he stay in an Econolodge? I would (as he ended up doing) rather sleep in the car. I often see them pulling off highways and you can witness the people lingering around outside and it looks as if they are primarily used by people for weekly stays that just got evicted from their trailers. Or drug dealers as a base to sell from.
Come to Hagerstown it’s worse in our motels from Valley Mall Motel 6 to Plaza and Holiday Inn. The smell is so bad, you stand outside to visit people.
Don’t laugh. The desk of the Quality Inn/Econolodge keeps bear spray (super sized pepper spray) on the counter to break up fights. I stayed there while I had a crew working on my house. One of the guys found a crack pipe & some type of drug powder in the nightstand. Oddly management didn’t think it was a big deal. Last night there I was terrified. Ugh
The fact that an Econolodge in Mississippi is gross is hardly newsworthy.
Exactly, in my earlier post I inadvertently left out the oppressive heat & humidity, hurricanes, tornado producing thunderstorms, swarms of bugs, venomous snakes, disease, rampant obesity & diabetes, poisonous politics, vicious state police and where the busiest job is the tooth-fairy.