I’m sure there’s a lot of truly fucked up hotels across the world vying for the title of the world’s worst hotel, but if I had to nominate a candidate on behalf of the U.S., that would be the Holiday Inn on Route 30, at 521 Greenfield Road, Lancaster PA, adjacent to the Pennsylvania Dutch CVB, and owned by Kronos Hotels LLC, an Atlanta-based hotel chain which operates the Inn as a franchise of InterContinental Hotels Group PLC (IHG). Why? Here’s a laundry list of whys from Lancaster Online.

1. The State Dept. of Agriculture walks in on the hotel to find them using a guest room with the air-conditioning going full blast as a refrigirator to store food supplies, cause their freezer wasn’t working.

2. On the same day, the State Police’s Bureau of Liquor Control was searching the hotel for evidence of unlicensed liquor sales.

3. The hotel owes room rental and excise taxes. Plus, nearly $30,000 in unpaid sales taxes.

4. Employees say the hotel issues paychecks which keep bouncing. Plus, the hotel deducts health insurance premiums from the (rubber) checks, and an employee reported that when he needed surgery, he was told the company didn’t have any insurance.

5. Electricity and cable repeatedly gets cut off due to unpaid dues.

6. Housekeeping has been instructed to refill used and discarded guest room shampoo bottles instead of putting in new ones. Trash bags are washed out and reused.

If you think there’s anything even worse than this atrocious dump, feel free to add your worst nightmare hotels in the comments below. Moving on to something a bit more interesting, but still scandalous. Japanese businessman Daisuke Enomoto is suing Virginia-based space tourism company ‘Space Adventures’.

Seems he coughed up a cool $21 million over a period of two years for a 10 day trip to the International Space Station in 2006. After having completed his training in Russia and having been certified (twice) as fit for the trip, he was then bumped off the list due to an apparent medical condition. Now he’s out $21 million, and no spacewalk to boot.

Posted on September 29th, 2008 by PLing
Filed under: Travel News