I’m not sure if there’s anything more disappointing than getting a bad hotel room on vacation. You embark on the journey with certain expectations for relaxation, fun, and excitement, and it only takes inadequate housing to ruin a lot of this. It could be a particularly loud hotel room situated near an elevator, or a dirty hotel in which you’re afraid to walk on the carpets, or even worse yet, a hotel with terrible HVAC service to its rooms. I have experienced all three of these scenarios, and I have to say that having poor heating and air conditioning is the biggest bummer of them all. You enter the hotel full of excitement and wonder, only to be shown to a stuffy room with no outside ventilation. The tiny HVAC situated under the window is never turned on when you arrive, and it takes quite a while for the itty bitty unit to make any difference in the overall air quality of the room. By the time that you find out how inefficiently the heater or air conditioner is, it’s too late; you’re already settled into the hotel room and unlikely to switch to another unit. It will be days of battling with the dinky thermostat, trying to turn the temperature up or down with little to no results. The unit may hum or bang all night long, making it hard to sleep while you sweat through the sheets. It might even give off an unappealing stench that taints every second you try to spend in the room. Poor HVAC; poor vacation.
