The Upgraded Points Team’s Worst Hotel Stays of 2025

What makes a bad hotel stay? Bad service? Broken items in your room? Showing up to a property that doesn’t look like the pictures that led you to make a reservation in the first place?

The good news is that the vast majority of our hotel stays this year were good — at a minimum — though many of them exceeded that and were great.

Unfortunately, we also stayed at some duds in 2025. What were our worst hotel stays this year? Here’s what our team members had to say.

Ryan Smith, News Managing Editor

I actually didn’t stay at this hotel. It was so bad that I walked out — the first time I’ve ever done that at a hotel.

Marriott recently acquired the Four Essen City Centre in Germany, converting it from a Holiday Inn Express. It’s apparently getting some renovations soon — something it desperately needs. The stay started with a less-than-ideal check-in experience, and then I began noticing the stains in the hallway. And then more of them in my room.

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That shouldn't be here. Image Credit: Ryan Smith

On top of the 13 stains on the floor in my room, there were also stains under the couch cushions and badly scuffed doors.

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Stains under the couch cushions. Image Credit: Ryan Smith

The final straw, though, was finding dirty socks and underwear in the room’s closet left behind by a previous guest. It made me question whether my room had actually been cleaned.

Initially, the hotel was reluctant to let me leave and provide a refund, given that my stay was prepaid. It took significant effort from the Marriott Bonvoy elite line (with 3 separate phone calls, including an employee hanging up on me) to get anyone to help me exit the hotel and find an alternative for the night without eating a bunch of money in the process.

Tiffany Eastham, Director of Compliance

Calling this my worst hotel stay of 2025 seems a tad cruel, but I stayed in a lot of great places this year — meaning this designation had to go somewhere. But that’s what you get when you book something last-minute without any reviews.

The Aiqinghai hotel in Dali, China, was quirky to say the least. It had its charm: hidden down a dark, winding, abandoned street under construction and essentially nonexistent on Google or Apple Maps (thank you to the kind local who led us, like pathetic sheep, to the hotel’s entrance in the pitch dark). But as we learned in the morning, it had 1 redeeming quality: It was on the lake.

This trip to China was taken with relatively new friends, and this hotel would be our first time sharing a room. When we arrived that evening, the receptionist took photos of our passports on her personal cellphone (sketchy) before leading us up to our room, jabbering away in Mandarin as if we understood.

When we stepped inside, she gave us the full room tour, in Mandarin, but all I could look at was the open-concept bathroom — equipped with saloon-style swinging doors as our “privacy” barrier. Being able to see (and hear) my new travel buddy sitting on the toilet from nearly all corners of the room? Cool. 

But you know what? It’s fine. It’ll be fine. We’ll take shifts and leave the room, and it’ll be … fine. But then the spiders. As a pair of arachnophobes sharing a room, it was very much not fine.

We also soon learned that our meager sink’s drain was just not connected. At all. Any water poured down the sink abruptly emptied straight onto the floor of our room. We quickly perfected a barricade of towels to contain the water, and that mound of soaking towels only grew as the days passed. I suffered many sock casualties during that stay from unknowingly stepping right into a puddle that had breached our towel defenses.

Dali is a lovely, charming town, and I now laugh at the memories of staying there. I would definitely revisit Dali, but I wouldn’t stay at this property again. 

Chris Hassan, Social Media and Brand Manager

Unfortunately, I’ve had my share of cancelled flights this year. While I generally make the most out of bad situations, there wasn’t much I could do when my 11 p.m. flight from Miami (MIA) to Rio de Janeiro (GIG) was rescheduled to 9 a.m. the following day.

American Airlines was gracious enough to provide a hotel for the overnight layover, but as you might expect, it wasn’t at a 5-star property. When I was assigned the EVEN Hotel Miami – Airport by IHG, I was rather optimistic, thanks to its 3.8 rating on Google. That optimism started to fade after waiting 45 minutes to check in … at midnight.

When I finally made it down the ragged hallway to my room, the door got stuck on a pile of takeout menus that had been slid underneath by seemingly all of the restaurants in the immediate area. Not a great sign for housekeeping or security.

Inside, the room was no better. Hair and dirt all over the floor, light switches that didn’t work, and rather optimistic text above the bed that read “Sleep well. Dream BIG.”

I did not sleep well nor dream at all, as I was too concerned about bed bugs.

Too tired to deal with it, I just left my bag fully zipped, rested my eyes for a few hours, and then headed straight back to the airport to have breakfast at the Flagship Lounge.

Final Thoughts

While our team stayed at some absolutely incredible hotels this year, we also stayed at some not-so-great properties. They included spiders, dirty rooms, and bad service — a regrettable combination we hope not to repeat in 2026.