I had one too many bad experiences with bad hotels while traveling with my family throughout my childhood.
In retrospect, I commend my parents for dragging my siblings and I out of the house every summer to take road trips to amusement parks or nature preserves.
Sometimes we went across the country to visit relatives in other states. However, since trips with families incur numerous costs, as a parent you have to save as much money as possible on everything. Whether it’s food for the kids or places to sleep on the way. It was the hotels and motels that we had to save on the most. All of the kids had to share a separate bed or the floor. Those nasty hotel rooms have made me avoid them now that I can afford to rent apartments and condominiums when I go on vacations or long trips. The internet has made it really easy to rent directly from people who use these properties for only a few weeks or months out of the year. However, dealing with people directly yields varying results in quality if the person doesn’t have many ratings yet. And if you’re making several stops on your trip, you’re often making last minute decisions without having ample time to look at dozens of user reviews on websites like Airbnb. Air conditioner and furnace quality varies from one unit to the next. Our recent trip saw us renting a condominium down south for a week while taking daily trips to the beach. Even though we enjoyed ourselves at the beach every afternoon, the condo wouldn’t cool down properly whenever we got back. I called the owner multiple times, but he assured me that there wasn’t anything wrong with the air conditioner.