Lost in Translation - Disastrous Hotel Stays.

This is just a small post to break up my Slovakia posts. I love the monthly travel linkup but often find it hard to find the time to take part. The last time I took part was in January when I told you all about my 2015 Travel Plans and Wishes. This month's theme is 'lost in translation', and I thought it would be fun to tell you all about some of the disastrous hotels we've stayed at that certainly did not match up to the advertisement.

Funnily enough all of these hotels are in Australia, they seem to have a very different idea of advertising to us, and thus we've been caught out a few times over the years. I know this doesn't exactly fit the 'translation' theme, but everyone else has done language-themed posts so I thought I'd do something a bit different - false advertising, which is basically lost in translation ;) different people look at things differently I guess!

Now, this was a fair few years ago now (almost ten!), but I still remember it very well. It was supposed to be a lovely hotel in Pemberton, in the South West region of Western Australia. We were on our way back from Albany up to Perth, and stopped off overnight for a break. The room was not exactly the nicest of rooms, there were creepy crawlies everywhere, and the strangest thing of all....there was a small hatch at the bottom of the door where if you ordered room service, they would open the hatch and put the food through. Naturally we thought this quite strange. 

I never found out why that was there :/ I'm very grateful we only stayed one night, it was a bit of a shock after the huge house we'd been staying in that had big picture windows overlooking the bay in Albany!

We weren't originally meant to stay in Hyden. We were going to Esperence and Bremer Bay and were supposed to go the route that goes via Kalgoorlie, however there was a huge bush fire days before we were supposed to go, and as the road was closed we had to change our plans. We ended up going via Hyden, which is where the famous 'wave rock' is right in the middle of the WA Wheatbelt. It's a great place to visit for a couple of hours, but sadly we were there for two days. The hotel brochure promised us lakeside villas set amongst the trees and wildlife. This was the lake...the closest I got to the 'sailing' I was promised, was sitting in a hole-filled canoe in the middle of the salt flat.

When we drove through towards our villa, the lake had no water in it, it was just pure salt. The trees were completely burned and the whole place looked like a desolate wasteland. And the wildlife? Numerous wolf spiders hanging above our beds. The villa didn't even have an oven - just a panini press/grill. We'd brought pizzas with us and had to put them in the panini press.

A Hotel in Denham

Another case of false advertising. Western Australia was a difficult one up until a few years ago, there weren't many luxury hotel options, especially in the more isolated places (aka, everywhere apart from Perth and Busselton). Online the website showed a gorgeous villa right on the beach, a hammock out the front and a swimming pool out the back. In reality it was a shack on a main road - you had to walk across the main road to get to the beach. There was no hammock, and the swimming pool was empty. There were bunkbeds to sleep in and the sofas collapsed under us when we sat down. Luckily, as you can see below, the nearby Monkey Mia more than made up for it! I even got to meet and feed wild dolphins!

Have you ever had any disastrous hotels? 

I guess on the plus side, we do have some hilarious stories now!