The room was filthy: 1) The refrigerator had been used by a previous guest who spilled things in it and housekeeping had not wiped it out; 2) the cabinet top where the coffee maker was sitting had not been wiped down; 3) the floor had not been vacuumed and I was stepping all over clumps of dirt and other debris with my bare feet; 4) the carpet in the hallways and the stairwells was even worse-so caked with mud I couldn’t be sure with the original color of the carpeting was supposed to be; 5) the bathroom door in my room was smeared with....something brown (I don’t even want to speculate what).
The condition of this room/hotel was unacceptable even during the best of times, but particularly during a pandemic when hotels should be taking extra measures to clean and sanitize their rooms.
There was a lot of wear and tear on the room itself. This hotel has not received any kind of remodeling or repairs in decades. One of the bathroom cabinet doors had been completely ripped off at its hinges and was missing entirely. The wood finish on the bathroom vanity was very worn and scratched up. The tissue dispenser that’s built into the bathroom vanity was busted and hanging lopsided.
Aside from the room not being clean, this building is very poorly built and even when the people on the floor above are simply walking around normally, it sounds like they’re stomping and that they’re about ready to fall through the ceiling at any moment. Furthermore, the rooms on my side of the hotel all have balconies or patios (the view is the parking lot, so if they’re charging more for it, don’t bother) and the sliding glass doors to these balconies are incredibly noisy, so every time the people above me opened their sliding door, it sounded like a train was passing over me. Every time somebody in another room closes their door, the whole building shakes. Since a lot of travelers come in late, I couldn’t get to sleep until well after 1:00AM, after everyone had settled in, and my one and only reason for staying in this hotel was to get a good night’s sleep before hitting the road again the next morning.
A filthy, noisy room and it cost me about $130 for the night, which I expect to pay for a destination hotel in a touristy area, but Redding is a hell hole. The whole area is extremely sketchy and I didn’t feel it all safe there.
I paid extra for a “deluxe“ room that should’ve had a frig and microwave, but this room had neither. Also, the room was filthy. When I pulled down the bedspread, I found multiple strands of hair in the bed, which were not my own because I’d only been in the room for a couple of minutes and hadn’t even sat on the bed yet. There was something black and sticky smeared all over the nightstand which were not stains because I was able to scrub it off using an alcohol wipe. This made me wonder if anything else in the room (light switches, TV remote, doorknobs, faucets, etc) had been wiped down and sanitized, which is a major concern during this pandemic. I spent about 30 minutes wiping down a room that the motel staff should’ve cleaned before I checked in, but obviously didn’t. The boxsprings had dark stains all over it that looked like blood. I stepped out for a minute to move my car, and when I returned there was a strange man trying to get into my room. He claimed it was his room and that all his stuff was inside. I called the front desk after he left and they explained that the room was, indeed, his, and they had mistakenly removed his stuff and given the room to me thinking that he was ready to check out. As a woman traveling alone, this made me feel very unsafe. I couldn’t be sure that the card key he had in his possession still worked for the room. That, along with the fact that I was sleeping in a bed I was sure hadn’t gotten clean sheets, and there was a car just outside my room with people sitting in it with the music blaring all night long, made it impossible to get any sleep.