A businessman was ‘horrified’ when he used the bathroom in his Travelodge hotel and said he was greeted with a swarm of flies coming out of a hole under the toilet and landing on his body
A city worker thought he’d booked a relaxing base to get some much-needed rest before a tough day at work. However he didn’t bank on sharing his hotel room with an infestation of other, rather unsavoury ‘guests’, that meant his peace was brutally disturbed.
Last month project director Dave Evans-Turner checked into the Cambridge Fourwentways branch of Travelodge in Cambridgeshire. He was due on a site in the city the next morning and the business he works for insists their employees get sufficient downtime between shifts. This was made entirely impossible due to an alleged plague of insects, according to the “angry” customer.
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“We have to sign in in the morning and say we’ve had 12 hours rest and we feel fit to work. This is a requirement,” Dave, from Portsmouth, Hampshire, said. “I went there wanting to relax but I spent my time complaining about these flies.”
Dave said he could see black dots on the floor in the bathroom when he first arrived, which turned out to be dead flies. He claimed they were about a centimetre long and more like flying ants than fruit flies. He went to reception to ask for another room only to be told they were fully booked so there were no other options.
When he returned to the room, he said he was “horrified” to find live flies coming out of a hole under the toilet. Having no choice but to stay put, he shut the bathroom door and killed the flies which were in the bedroom before going to sleep.
When he had to use the toilet in the night, his real-life nightmare was about to get a lot worse. “There were live flies everywhere but I didn’t think too much of it and used the toilet,” he alleged. “They were crawling on my back, I was covered in flies, it was quite horrendous.”
When he woke in the morning, Dave said he found even more – around 40 – live bugs were “everywhere”. He claimed he had to “part through the barrage of flies” to get in the shower and got out of the room as soon as he had finished in the bathroom.
Dave was supposed to stay for a second night but checked out that morning and complained to the hotel’s manager, who reportedly said he would be refunded for both nights of his £160 stay. Apparently the room shouldn’t have been let out because they couldn’t get to the bottom of the infestation.
However Dave claimed he was only refunded for one night and said customer services refused to take the issue any further. They reportedly said it was because he had booked a ‘saver fare’ instead of a ‘flexi fare’, so he couldn’t get his money back for both nights. “I was really angry because I asked the manager and I said I’m not going to let this go. I asked to speak to a supervisor and he came up with the same responses, saying they’re not going to refund me.”
Thankfully Dave’s issue has now been resolved and Travelodge explained the problem was “isolated” only to the room in question, which had been taken off sale while it was treated.
A Travelodge spokesperson said: “We would like to apologise to Mr Evans-Turner for his recent experience with us. On this rare occasion we did not meet our normal high standard of service.
“We have carried out a thorough investigation and Mr Evans-Turner has been issued a full refund for his two-night stay. We hope that we can welcome Mr Evans-Turner back to Travelodge again in the future.”
