When you’re booking a hotel for the first time, it’s always a gamble. And if you travel often, chances are you’ve stayed at a place or two you would never return to. So, redditor u/Traditional_Dirt_788 asked, “People who travel, what is an immediate red flag in hotels?” Here’s how people responded, including a few members of the BuzzFeed Community (and I also added one of my own).

1.“No mattress protector on the bed. No matter how cheap, any hotel worth its salt should have a mattress protector for bugs and liquids.”

2.“When you notice additional fees that aren’t included in the estimate. This is new to me, but had I known I’d need to pay an ‘urban fee’ on my last trip to Chicago, I may have looked elsewhere for lodging.”

—u/tacobelmont

3.“No free (or available) WiFi. It’s 2024, and WiFi should be available in any hotel, and it should be free for those staying there.”

4.“Price. If the hotel you’re considering is way cheaper than similar hotels in the area, there’s a reason for that.”

—u/jacobius86

5.“When the towels and linens smell mostly like bleach — red flag.”

6.“I’ve stayed thousands of nights in hotels, but I only once checked into a hotel where I was asked at the front desk to leave a cash deposit to be given a TV remote control. I figured that was not a good sign, and it turned out I was right.”

—u/username-_redacted

7.“When you’re looking at a place online, and there are absolutely no photos of the exterior or the street/neighborhood, rather just generic-looking photos of beds and the breakfast room.”

8.“This only applies to larger hotels: When all employees are really young. Not a single employee over the age of 20-23 in view. In my experience, this means that whoever is managing the hotel is only hiring the cheapest possible employees, who generally don’t know their rights. On every occasion like this, service has been completely absent.”

—u/azthal

9.“Overly aggressive air fresheners. If you get to the hotel and the room has a strong air freshener smell, it is trying to mask bad smells like mold, sewage, or worse.”

10.“If, before you even walk into the lobby, you can smell the chlorine smell from the hot tub that’s behind closed doors.”

—u/Flappy_beef_curtains

11.“If the key is still a metal key and not a card access key. It suggests there have been no updates to the rooms, ventilation, plumbing, etc.”

12.“Little dark brown spots near the top of the bed, below the mattress, or in mattress seams. These mean bedbugs.”

—u/KarlSethMoran

13.“If you reach out ahead of time and the reservations department or concierge isn’t responsive or helpful before you arrive, it probably won’t be much better during your stay.”

14.“Your Uber driver asking ‘you sure?’ as you pull up to the hotel.”

—u/MayonnaiseFarm

15.“Look at the thinness of the sheets and roughness of the towels from being washed too many times. My family has owned two hotels since the ’60s, and about every decade, we hire some consultant to come and tell us what we are doing wrong. They always say we are scrapping our worn linens too early, that we can get another six months out of them. Without fail, it is the one piece of advice we always ignore. We did a cost analysis, and it is worth the cost of having happy guests rather than saving a marginal amount by having sheets you can read a newspaper through.”

16.“If nobody is at reception, particularly if it’s advertised as a 24-hour service, that’s always a bad sign. It suggests that the receptionist is either super busy doing the work of three people and the place is understaffed, or the staff lacks discipline. Understaffed means extra wait times for everything, and a lack of discipline means nobody cares, so everything from breakfast to bar service will be a major challenge.”

17.“Read the Google reviews before you book and see if the owners/managers respond kindly (if at all). If they attack the negative reviewers at all, stay away,”

—u/islandsimian

18.“The most immediate red flag was when I checked into a hotel and asked when breakfast was served in the morning. I was told breakfast starts at 9 a.m. When I responded that 9 a.m. is a bit late and I have early meetings, the concierge responded, ‘Oh, do you want it now?’ It was around 8 p.m. at the time. It didn’t get any better from there.”

19.“Withholding your passport. I had this happen to me the first night I stayed in a hotel in Vietnam, and after firmly stating that I’d leave and find somewhere else to stay if they kept my passport, it was returned to me. They tried to tell me it was protocol, but I’ve traveled all over the world and spent plenty of time in Vietnam since then and never surrendered my passport. Never, ever separate from your passport.”

What’s a hotel or short-term rental red flag to watch out for while booking? Tell us in the comments or in this anonymous form.

Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.