Source:
https://scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/travel/article/3022123/worst-tripadvisor-reviews-guests-complain-nudity Travel
The worst TripAdvisor reviews: guests complain of nudity, drunks, ghosts and ‘bland food’
- The holiday review site hosts groans and gripes ranging from the outraged, the apoplectic, the humorous and even the supernatural
- And there’s ‘absolutely nothing ladylike’ about the ‘liars and cheats’ at Hong Kong’s Ladies Market, warns one commenter
The user-contributed review site allows disgruntled patrons to vent in the most passive aggressive and entertaining way.
Trawling through the 760 million-plus reviews listed on TripAdvisor can be both fascinating and highly entertaining.
There’s much talk of toilet paper, or more accurately, a lack of it. Tales of filthy bedding and stained carpets are ubiquitous – as are descriptions of hotel managers who behave in the same rude, incompetent manner as the fictional hotelier Basil Fawlty. Reports of bed bugs, while probably legitimate, could also have come from the jealous owner of the establishment across the street. Ditto accusations of food poisoning. But these are all minor gripes compared to the colourful scenarios outlined below.
Let’s begin in the English seaside town of Blackpool, where bedbugs are apparently the least of a visitor’s problems: “Went to room at 1.45 after a great evening to find a drunken man semi naked in our bed. Not the best ending to our evening.”
Here’s a two-part complaint from Winchester, England, although it’s unclear whether there’s a connection: “We were disgusted to find the manager walking around with his trousers half down and backside hanging out. We also found out the chef had left.”
Inebriated staff are a recurring, and sometimes amusing, TripAdvisor theme – as long as it happens to someone else. In Worthing, England: “The barman informed us that he didn’t really know how to check us in but, due to the receptionist being drunk at the end of the bar, he would definitely be more help than she would be.”
Then there are those seductive non-verbal messages that can mean only one thing: “Blonde lady at reception was flirting and winking, sending kisses to me.”
However, something might have been lost in translation judging by this response from the Salzburg hotel in question: “The blonde lady, working at reception […] is newly (and happily) married, so it is not necessary for her to blow kisses at any of our guests.”
More flirting, this time on the Greek island of Crete. Hardly the holiday romance the reviewer was expecting: “Celine Sweetie, a member of staff at this hotel, continued to flirt with my then boyfriend as she tried to sell him tickets. They then started messaging over Facebook and then our relationship ended on holiday because of this.”
Flirting is one thing but in the Dominican Republic, a honeymooning couple were, let’s say, beaten to it: “My husband went to see if our room was ready. It was, so he took the bags up to the room by himself, opened the door and there was a couple having sex in our room!!”
Oh well, at least no one died. Unlike in a certain New York establishment: beneath the heading, “dead body under the bed”, guests checking into the hotel were both shocked and short-changed. “When we were there, they found a dead body in a room, so we decided to leave one day early, but they refused to give us our money back!”
Meanwhile, after switching apartments due to nightclub noise while holidaying in Turkey, this couple couldn’t see the wood for the trees: “The following morning we were disgusted to find, when we opened our curtains, that our only view was a mass of trees. It was like being in a forest.” A forest? How disgusting. Thankfully they weren’t given a sea view – it would have been like being on a boat.
Hong Kong doesn’t escape the TripAdvisor treatment either. A visitor from New York seethes through a 975-word rant headed: FRAUD WARNING – AVOID LADIES MARKET. Sometimes, though, brevity is better for getting the message across, as this rather blunt message proves: “Be very careful here – there is absolutely nothing ladylike about the ladies that run this market; they are liars, thieves and cheats.”
Capital letters are the TripAdvisor equivalent of steam coming out of an irate reviewer’s ears and a handful of adjectives appear with alarming regularity, including DISGRACEFUL, DISGUSTING, UNBELIEVABLE, SHOCKING and, er, SILVIA.
“We had to wait for at least half-hour for somebody to come to reception when the man arrived he was definitely drunk, then SILVIA came along in her heels and took about 20 minutes to check us in.”
We got trapped in the lift twice (each time it freefalled to the bottom with a crash which was truly terrifying). The food was bland and repetitive
Poor old Silvia in her heels. If there’s anything in this (Sunny Beach, Bulgaria) description that requires capitalisation, surely it’s MAN, RECEPTION and DRUNK.
A run-down hotel in Pristina, Kosovo, sounds like it deserves some upper-case umbrage. One TripAdvisor scribe fumed: “If I had an enemy, I’d send him there,” while another less-than-satisfied guest compared a stay to serving a prison sentence: “Someone doing hard time before me left tally marks with a black marker on the wall.”
Talking of being trapped in a confined space, there are almost as many “stuck in a lift” stories on TripAdvisor as there are light-fingered staff alerts. Some hapless holidaymakers even report getting stuck in the same elevator more than once. Describing a stay in Malta, one reviewer creates tension from the first sentence: “We got trapped in the lift twice (each time it freefalled to the bottom with a crash which was truly terrifying)” before dialling down the drama by adding, “The food was bland and repetitive.”
But if there’s one thing that sends guests gaga, it’s a brush with the supernatural. This visitor to a hotel in Manchester, England, certainly won’t be returning: “Had to be moved from our room, as the mirror was rippling, bad energy felt. Anyone else experienced anything? Staff members odd, and who was the man with the hoover in the early hours of the morning.”
Who indeed? My guess would be a cleaner working the night shift.
But Nevada, in the United States, is the place for truly ghoulish encounters. Under the heading: “Hotel is Definitely Haunted”, a quivering whistle-blower warns the TripAdvisor community that “ROOM #10 in the Overland Hotel has a POLTERGEIST problem!”
The 600-word account begins by introducing us to the receptionist who “flashed a foreshadowing wicked grin”. The ghost writer then goes on (and on) to describe “doors slamming shut” and “shadowy beings” that attacked his brother “by holding him down on his bed with a pillow to the point that he couldn’t even breathe, let alone yell for help.”
Sometimes, the disclaimer “This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC” isn’t really necessary.