Last week, I made a long trip from Boulder, Colorado to Lewisville, Texas. The purpose of my trip was to wrap up some loose ends with our new Dallas mold inspeciton company (www.MoldInspectionDallas.com). I arrived late, after a 14 hour drive, to my hotel. It turns out there were lots of problems with the hotel, but the one that I thought was ironic was that my room had a mold problem!
My room was on the first floor. The second floor had a similar layout of rooms. Thus, the bathroom of the unit above me was directly above my bathroom. In the bathroom of my room there was a large water stain on the ceiling above the shower enclosure and there was visible mold growth all over the drywall above the enclosure.
The majority of the mold growth was under wall paper that was peeling off. This particular hotel is a three star establishment and a well known hotel brand. It baffles me that this problem was not seen by the house keeping staff, maintenance staff, or by someone performing a routine walk through of the suite.
I called the front desk and asked them to send a manager to my room. When the person arrived, I gave them my business card and explained to them the problem in the room, asked if we could be placed in a new room, and suggested that they have the rest of the rooms professionally inspected.
We were moved to the room directly above the current room. Although the bathroom in the new room was not in as bad shape visually, it suffered from the same poor design of wallpaper directly above the shower enclosure.
I didn’t get the sense that the management of the hotel understood the problem and potential liability they face. However, I did send them a nice letter indicating what I saw at their hotel and suggested that they contact our Dallas office to schedule an inspection. It will be interesting to see if we hear from them…
