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When Being Cheap Backfires – My Hotel Mistake

Last Updated: June 4, 2018 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 118 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

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When Being Cheap Backfires - My Hotel MistakeWe are currently on another road trip to Colorado. We are attempting to climb and summit a few mountains, but we also want to explore different areas we may want to move to.

Since we have been going on so many trips lately, I have been looking for different ways to save money. I am a personal finance blogger after all, so that only makes sense.

So, I found a place the other day. We have been booking everything as we go, and since it was Labor Day weekend, nearly everything was already sold out or extremely overpriced. I found a hotel for $80 a night, and we only wanted to stay there for two nights. Our total damage was $160.

It was a great price when compared to the other places I found in the area for Labor Day weekend.

However, the cheap price was the only good thing about this place. Being cheap though can cost you money. Below are some of the bad things about the place we paid for:

  • The room smelled very bad. Like a dead person… I wish I was exaggerating but it is the truth. We couldn’t breathe because it was so bad and at one point I even had to put my shirt over my nose.
  • The room next door had their door wide open. My dog almost ran inside, so I peaked in and I was horrified. It was filled almost to the ceiling with trash bags and garbage. There was also a crazy pile of shoes that was around four feet high and six feet wide.
  • There was a blood stain and splatters about a foot wide on the carpet right in the middle of our room. It was impossible to miss.
  • There were multiple hairs all over the bed and on the pillows. This means nothing was washed or cleaned when we went in.
  • There were BIG stains all over the bed. Talk about wanting to barf everywhere.
  • The fridge in the room had food stains all over it. It was absolutely disgusting.
  • The pillows were stained yellow.
  • There were multiple brown stains on the wall.
  • The door and window both did not lock. This was scary considering I would be working from the room a lot alone since Wes had plans to do other things.
  • We saw several other people enter their room, only to leave seconds later and not come back.
  • They claimed they had good wifi, but there was not a single person at the hotel and I still couldn’t get a single thing to load. Keep in mind this is important because I work from my laptop.
  • They also claimed they were pet friendly, but when we arrived I noticed that there was no grass. When I asked the person at the front desk, she said there was a park just right around the corner that we could go to with no problem. Well, it turned out the park was four looooong blocks down a busy street and there was no sidewalk there. This meant I had to walk four blocks down a busy street with two dogs and then cross this busy street where there were no sidewalks (not even a curb), streetlights, stop signs, or anything. That is just too dangerous and mean for me to do to my dogs multiple times a day.
  • Lastly, someone claimed they saw a ghost in their room and they panicked. Haha this still makes me laugh but it made me wonder what kind of crazy people were at this hotel.

Wow, it’s just scary writing about everything we saw in the one hour we were there.

We checked in, left to grab something to eat, got back to the room and immediately started finding another place to stay.

At first, I was extremely upset that I prepaid for this place. However, since this was a “vacation,” staying in a place where we literally wanted to throw up just wasn’t going to work.

I found another hotel and booked it as soon as I could. I then walked into the front desk to the gross hotel we were at and checked out immediately.

And this is how being cheap backfired on me. I didn’t want to spend an extra $50 a day in order to stay somewhere “normal” and instead I ended up wasting $160 and a few hours because we couldn’t bare to stay in that hotel for more than a few hours.

I know there are others who are fine with staying anywhere and they only care about having a place to sleep, but I just could not do it. I thought about it for a slight second just because of the money I’d be wasting, but then I realized how crazy that sounded.

Luckily enough, the person checking me in at the next hotel asked where we just came from and how our day was. I explained our horrific story and how I was so glad that they had room for us at their much better hotel. He said he could NOT BELIEVE where we came from and that he knew we must have been horrified because we were actually not the first person who did the exact same thing we did (check in at the bad hotel, only to leave and go to his hotel). He then said he added a discount to our stay and that it was no problem. I told him he didn’t need to but he insisted. Isn’t that awesome?!

Anyway, here are my tips to avoid making a costly mistake like I just did. Being cheap can cost you money!

 

Read the reviews.

I am a serial review reader, so I can honestly say that I read numerous reviews about this hotel. The reviews weren’t the greatest, but it sounded like a lot of people were just used to luxury hotels so I ignored them.

OH MY GOD was that a huge mistake.

From now on, I will always trust bad reviews, especially when there are a ton of them.

 

Compare the pricing.

The other hotels in the area were about $50 more per night. I thought I didn’t want to spend that, so that was the main reason we booked the BAD BAD BAD hotel.

In the end, the $50 extra per night was well worth it.

We received a clean room, a fantastic dog walking area and even a trail along a river to walk our dogs, fast wi-fi, breakfast in the mornings that was actually good, good customer service, and more. We also feel much safer here.

 

Think about how badly you want to save money.

I thought that since it was only two days, that I wouldn’t really care about how cheap the place was. I thought for $80, that the hotel couldn’t possibly be THAT bad, because $80 still isn’t dirt cheap. Considering I’ve stayed in nice hotels in the Caribbean and Florida for around $100 a night, I thought an $80 hotel would be somewhere near average.

Nope, I was wrong. I couldn’t make it an hour so there was no way I would have been able to make it two days.

I didn’t want the savings that bad and I realized that once we arrived at the hotel. This hotel should have been no where near $80 a night. I think it should have been one of those $29.95 highway motels that I often see.

 

Has being cheap backfired on you recently? How much money did you lose?

 

Last image via Flickr by Nitram242

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118 Comments
Filed Under: Budget, Life, Travel Tagged With: Budget, Life, Travel

About Michelle Schroeder-Gardner

Michelle is the founder of Making Sense of Cents, a blog about personal finance and traveling. She discusses how her business has evolved in her side income series. She paid off $40,000 in student loans by the age of 24 mainly due to her freelancing side hustles. Click here to learn more about starting a blog!

Comments

  1. Ms. LoL says

    September 2, 2014 at 9:00 pm

    Er, wow. That is just horrible sounding. I hope you got lots of pictures for disputing reasons! Geez, I’d have probably ripped into the person at the front desk…

    Reply
    • Michelle S. says

      September 3, 2014 at 10:04 am

      I really regret not taking photos. I completely forgot!

      Reply
  2. Ashley Busse says

    September 3, 2014 at 12:40 am

    I am a HORRIBLE cheap-skate. Even after reading this, I won’t lie, I’ll probably go the cheapest route humanly possible. I HATE spending money.

    Reply
  3. Xmasdolly says

    September 3, 2014 at 5:08 pm

    My experience wasn’t exactly like yours, but similar. I had back surgery at this hospital, and the physical therapy was full and they said I could go to another place, and I chose a place close to home. So because I picked the place closer to home & less expensive they brought me to a place that was an assisted living place with CNA’s and a couple of therapists. Not only was this place filled with old people 90 and up.. okay 80 & up… the place smelled like old people, and it wasn’t all that clean either with old furniture. My bed had a permanent slope in it where a body was in the middle and so low it was practically next to the floor. I did not want to stay, but husband said I had too. That evening I did some investigating, and found out it was an old folks home, and that I was there first physical therapy patient because they were going to change over to half & half to get more income coming in. OKAY NOT HAPPY! Then I wanted a shower and the nurse finally said come on and I went in there she says, “Okay clothes off and there were no stalls just a few shower heads and a hose and she started to hose me down, nurses walking in and out like it was Grand Central and even a male nurse and that’s when I called it quits. I called husband and said NOW! And told him if he didn’t come get me I’d take a cab and I signed myself out of that hell. It was horrible and I’ll never forget it as long as I live.

    Reply
  4. Irene Newstead says

    September 5, 2014 at 4:41 pm

    Blood stains on the carpet? Definitely not a place I would want to stay.

    Reply
  5. Sarah Vegetabile says

    September 6, 2014 at 12:52 pm

    I have had something simalar happen. I learned from that mistake real fast. Sorry you went thru this but boy does it teach us in the end!!

    Reply
  6. Rachel says

    September 8, 2014 at 11:08 am

    Hopefully you left a terrible review on their website/Yelp! Yuck

    Reply
  7. Victoria @thefrugaltrial says

    September 12, 2014 at 7:05 am

    That sucks. There is a fine line when booking hotels for paying a decent price for a decent room and being cheap and lumbered with a terrible hotel. It is very difficult to gage.

    I am also a serial tripadvisor reviewer, as I tend to take a lot of reviews with a pinch of salt (anyone who complains hotel staff in foreign countries don’t speak english have their reviews discounted!) I am generally happy to stay at places with mediocre reviews.

    In 2006 I had a very cheap holiday to Greece (£160 for a week!!), it was an absolute dive. Room only made up for two (there were three of us), there were drool marks on the pillows, no spare blankets, only one toilet roll for the week, staff that were racist to my jamaican friend. The only advantage was that it was away from the bars.

    Reply
  8. Myles Money says

    September 12, 2014 at 11:24 am

    I’m sorry, but I laughed so hard when I read this. We stayed in a hotel a few years ago and it sounds as though it could be part of the same group. Awful! Recently I bought a bunch of lightbulbs on special offer thinking I was getting a bargain: 75% off. The problem is, they’re such poor quality they “pop” after a week and they need replacing. Cheap is good, but quality counts too.

    Reply
  9. Dana says

    October 10, 2014 at 8:35 pm

    I will pay extra for things like hotel rooms because I had a few experiences where the cheapest room ended up being like this story-or was in a really unsafe part of town or cost us more to get to the touristy parts

    Reply
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  1. Shout Outs: Travel Edition - The Write Budget says:
    September 12, 2014 at 6:34 am

    […] When Being Cheap Backfires- My Hotel Mistake by Making Sense of Cents […]

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  2. 6 Ways Being Cheap Can Cost You Money – Making Sense Of Cents says:
    December 31, 2014 at 9:39 pm

    […] in August, I spent $160 on a hotel that was significantly cheaper than the ones surrounding it. I was hoping that I found […]

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