Bargain Babe: Hotel Hunting Horror Stories

We all know you get what you pay for, but in New York City you get even less. Four years after leaving the tri-state area for sunny Los Angeles, I re-learned this lesson while using a booking site to score a budget hotel room on the Upper West Side with appalling results.

The $145 room — well below normal prices for a Manhattan hotel — had a shared bathroom and lacked amenities. But, I reasoned, it'd be fine for one night. I'd used this particular booking site in the past and found great deals on beautiful hotel rooms. I trusted that they'd never work with sub-par hotels. (Mistake No. 1).

We arrived a few minutes before check-in and noticed that after each party checked in an attendant walked them to their room. When it was our turn, a young woman led us through a maze of connected buildings so disorienting that I joked about getting lost. So this is why we were walked to our room, I thought. (Mistake No. 2).

The woman stopped in a narrow hallway and turned the key...no modern card swipes at this ancient hotel. She opened the door and motioned for us to step inside.

I was stunned. The blue carpet was so ancient it was beyond cleaning. The pillows were flat as pancakes, and a mysterious odor slowed my breathing as I stared past the attendant to the single window, blurred by years of muck, looking onto an old alley. My eyes fell on the bed — oh how I was ready for a nap! — until I looked closer.

"Do you still want the room?" the woman asked, noticing our hesitation.

I looked at my friend, looked at the attendant, and paused. Gingerly, I turned down the sheets and searched for see tiny red spots, a tell-tale sign of bed bugs. The thin yellowed sheets showed through to the mattress. I did not see any spots, but the light was too dim to erase all my doubts.

"We heard there were bed bugs," I said to the woman.

She shook her head. "The things people write online," she said. "Disgruntled employees."

"Oh, okay." I wasn't sure I believed her.

"So the room is okay?"

No, it was not okay. But what could we do? I was so ashamed that I had gotten myself into this situation, that I had believed I could get such an amazing deal, and that I was too cheap to pony up for a better room in the first place, so I looked at the woman and nodded. (Mistake No. 3.)

She left, closing the door behind her with an air of finality.

"Do you want to stay here?" I asked my dismayed friend.

"Do you want to stay here?"

We both agreed we could, if necessary, suffer through a night in the dingy hotel room. But our instincts held us back: we both really, really wanted to find a different hotel — if we weren't staying somewhere swanky, it should at least be clean. We gathered our bags and marched back to the lobby.

"We changed our minds," I said. "The room is not acceptable. I'm sorry."

The hotel staff was ticked off. The manager refused to give us a canceled receipt because, he claimed, it was the booking site that charged us. Arguing was useless. We walked out.

I immediately called the booking site and asked them to refund the $145 charge because, to put it mildly, the room did not match the online description. The customer service agent offered me a 10% refund. I politely pushed back, and declined again when she offered me a $50 credit. When I finally reached a manager, he refused to help a returning customer and, after more than an hour on hold, my cell phone battery died. The next day I called my credit card company to contest the charge.

Whether or not I end up paying for that hotel room, I've learned three lessons. First: I was greedy, thinking I could find a better price for a hotel room than the millions of other tourists who visit New York City. Second: I made assumptions about the quality of the hotel online, and didn't recognize my error until it was too late. Finally: I kept quiet, accepting the room when I should have spoken my mind and refused to stay.

As karmic payback, I booked a ridiculously expensive hotel a few blocks away, slept extremely well, and made free Starbucks coffee the next morning in my room.

Copyright 2010 Shoestring, LLC and BargainBabe.com. Photo: iStock