Travellers reveal the hotel red flags you should look out for – and the disturbing sign you should leave immediately

Seasoned travelers have revealed the top red flags to look out for when checking into your accommodation.

On Reddit, holidaymakers list all the red flags, from ‘too much air freshener’ to ‘an itchy throat’ when entering the room.

And each seemed to have a gruesome story to match their advice.

The woman who warned people to watch their throats explained that this could mean the room is overrun with creepy crawlies.

“If you get a sore throat and eyes as soon as you enter the room, it’s possible they are treating a bedbug infestation and you should leave unless you want to know how well the treatment is going,” she said.

She also explained how she learned about the side effects of bed bug treatment.

‘Since it can take about a week for the bite marks to appear, we had no idea until we got home. “When we realized we had covered our house with powder and spray and everything else you can buy to treat it, I noticed it caused the same creepy feeling we had all the time in the hotel,” she said.

Others said there are more signs that the room has some unwanted guests in bed.

‘Small dark brown spots near the top of the bed, under the mattress and in the mattress seams. These are nasty bedbugs,” one woman revealed.

As for strong ‘pleasant’ odors.

“If you get to the hotel and the room smells strongly of air fresheners, they are trying to mask bad smells like mold, sewage or worse,” one woman warned.

Another added: ‘I agree I stayed in a hotel for two weeks – when the smell of the air freshener faded I realized I was stuck in a moldy shelter. I got a headache and then I realized why.’

One traveler warned that thick ‘bulletproof glass’ around reception is ‘no joke’.

“Run for the hills, I didn’t do that,” they warned.

And people agreed.

Taking to Reddit, the holidaymakers listed every red flag, from ‘too much air freshener’ to ‘sore throat’ after entering the room

‘The last time I stayed there, the receptionist stole my credit card number. About fifteen minutes after I checked in, a few hundred dollars was spent at a Dollar General a few hundred miles away,” one person said.

Others said they never book ‘the cheapest’ hotel in town.

“If there are a lot of hotels, it’s a very bad sign to be the cheapest.”

‘I’m now the one who books hotels, because my partner always finds the cheapest hotel in a city or neighborhood for a remarkable amount of money, and we always have to leave.

“The second or third cheapest hotel is almost always cheap enough and head and shoulders better in quality,” agrees another.

Others said if you can “smell chlorine” from the hot tub or pool, you should reconsider taking a dip or staying overnight.

“I never realized what a big red flag this is until my SO bought a hot tub for his house.” He takes great care to ensure that there is almost never a chlorine smell. Unfortunately, smelling a lot of chlorine means there are a lot of nasty things in the water.’

An expert adds: ‘For indoor swimming pools, this simply means that hardly any maintenance is done on the pool. I worked on swimming pools for almost ten years, I will never use a hotel swimming pool.’

And the final red flag is if all the staff are ‘under 22 or 23 years of age’.

‘If they only employ young staff, it means that management hires the cheapest people. They have no experience and no pride in their work and it will show,” one woman warned.

Former hotel staff agreed.

‘I’ve worked in hotels and would always walk through lobbies to see if there were older people working the reception desk. As long as the management is older, then it’s probably not the place I want to be.’