If you’re planning a vacation and staying at a Four Seasons there’s not a lot to worry about. You get what you pay for. On the other side of the coin if you are looking at the America’s Best Value Hotel it is pretty clear you’re going to be mixing it up with bedbugs and transients. Shopping for affordable rooms on a budget can often be tricky.
The vast majority of hotels are somewhere in the middle. Even with many national brands one property could be a great place to stay while another in the same brand family causes you enormous headaches. You can do your diligence and check the reviews on sites but it is impossible to know if the people writing them are reliable and knowledgeable. It could also be the case that much has changed at the hotel since the review was written. So how can you tell if a hotel is nice or not before you stay?
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Signs, Signs, Everywhere the Signs…
If you walk into a hotel lobby and see signs like these posted you should be wary about the hotel’s quality. When you walk into the Ritz Carlton South Beach they are not threatening to tow your car. They aren’t reminding you that most customers only have a few hundred dollars in their checking accounts. The more signs you see, and the more homemade they look, the worse the quality you can expect.
The signs in these photos are from a Holiday Inn Express in Marietta near Truist Park. The hotel and my stay were overall fine but the parking permit thing was really annoying. The sign tries to blame “the parking company.” Who hired the parking company to boot cars? It is the hotel owner doing this to their own customers.
I’ve seen signs in other hotels that are all the way down to hand-written in quality. Whatever the sign says, that’s what you can expect to be putting up with during your stay. Sometimes it is charging locals more because the property has become a hotspot for hotel parties. If they are reminding people not to leave trash in the halls, expect to see a lot of trash in the halls. Are they telling people not to smoke weed in the rooms? A lot of people are smoking weed in those rooms. The signs might even give you an idea of how many people are living at a property semi-permanently.
Unfortunately these signs will never be visible in the hotel’s promotional images that are syndicated across the web. It is always a good idea to not just read reviews but check the user generated photos on your booking site. If you see signs made on printer paper in those photos close the tab and book another hotel. You might be in for a wild night if you don’t.
