Where does Asheville rank among list of US cities with worst-rated hotels?

While Asheville — a city that certainly knows hotels — was happily absent from PlanetWare’s list of cities with the country's worst-rated hotels, data shows that local hotels have some areas for improvement.

Travel website PlanetWare’s April 2023 study analyzed 7.8 million TripAdvisor hotel reviews from over 95 cities. With the most common bad reviews left for hotels nationwide involving smoke smells, lack of toilet paper, bed bugs and thin walls causing noise problems, no city would want to end up in their “Hotel Horrors” roundup.

Director of Media Relations Matthew Zajechowski offered the Citizen Times a positive from their findings for starters — not only did Asheville fail to make the list of worst hotels, but key findings showed that the city ranks No. 18 out of the nearly 100 cities surveyed for cleanest hotels. Factors used by PlanetWare to define dirty hotels are items like bloodstains, dirty carpets and black mold.

Unfortunately, however, Asheville’s hotel offerings are far from perfect.

Zajechowski also told the Citizen Times that Asheville ranked No. 12 for the hotels with the highest frequency of reviews mentioning smelly rooms at 30%, and No. 24 for hotels with the noisiest rooms at 24%.

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What makes a hotel 'the worst?'

PlanetWare’s site explains the metric they use to define “worst hotels.”

“The names on this list represent American cities that had a high volume of low ratings for their hotels,” the site stated. “To determine the ranking, we calculated the percentage of all analyzed hotel reviews in a given city to find the percentage that was 1-star or 2-star reviews.”

The top — or bottom — five hotels on PlanetWare’s list, including one tie:

1. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

2. (Tie) Atlantic City, New Jersey.

3. (Tie) Virginia Beach, Virginia.

4. San Jose, California.

5. South Padre Island, Texas.

PlanetWare stated that 20% of Myrtle Beach hotel reviews were one or two stars, and only marginally less for Atlantic City and Virginia Beach, both at 19%.

Also offered from PlanetWare’s research was a list of cities with the worst ranked hotel service. Their top five:

1. Miami Beach, Florida.

2. Montauk, New York.

3. Cape May, New Jersey.

4. Siesta Key, Florida.

5. New York, New York.

Luckily for visitors and residents alike, Asheville has held its own in this category, resting towards the bottom of the list at no. 78.

Zajechowski’s full list of Asheville’s rankings — the good, the bad and the dirty:

• 12th for hotels with the highest frequency of reviews mentioning smelly rooms.

• 18th for cleanest hotels.

• 24th for hotels with the noisiest rooms.

• 26th for hotels with reviews mentioning bugs in the room.

• 30th for the hotels with the least amount of reviews mentioning stains in the room.

• 41st for hotels with the most mentions of poop left behind in the room.

• 47th for hotels mentioning mold in the room.

• 52nd for rooms mentioning hair left behind in the room.

• 78th for worst hotel service.

To look at the full lists of cities with worst hotels and worst hotel service, take a look at PlanetWare’s website.

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Iris Seaton is a news intern for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA TODAY Network. Please support local, daily journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Asheville's rank on new list of U.S. cities with worst rated hotels