The Best Thing To Do If Your Hotel Room Reeks Of Cigarette Smoke, Per A Travel Agent

Ahhh, Waikiki! You've been waiting all year for this vacation in Hawaii to truly begin. You swipe your key card and breeze into the crisp, beautiful, nonsmoking hotel room you booked ... only to be sucker-punched by the acrid smell of stale cigarette smoke wafting off the carpet and curtains. Suddenly, it's as if you're a helpless 10-year-old, sitting in the back seat of your grandpa's Pontiac, trying not to turn green as he taps ash into the ashtray while regaling you with stories about the good old days, when the ad in Life Magazine read: "More doctors smoked Camels than any other cigarette." Before 2000, when smoking was fully banned on planes, people could have fired up cigarettes on a domestic flight, too. It's hard to imagine today, but yep, folks used to smoke on airplanes, in hotels, bars, restaurants. We're now so used to smoke-free hotels that it can be a shock to encounter. But it happens.

Explore spoke to Victoria Fricke, owner of luxury travel agency Vic's Vacations, to get the skinny on how you should handle such a stinky predicament. "Timing is everything on this, to avoid being blamed for causing the odor," Fricke says. "As soon as you check into the room, if there's an odor (smoke or beyond), make it known to the front desk. You'd rather move before unpacking anyway!" She also says to review and confirm that your reservation is for a nonsmoking room before you approach the front desk. 

Whether your room reeks because the guest before you broke the rules and smoked in a nonsmoking room, or because you or the hotel made an error and booked you in a smoking room, what should you do if there are no other rooms available? Can you demand a refund? And if you choose to hold your nose and stay anyway, should you be compensated in some way for your trouble? "This depends on a few things," travel agent Victoria Fricke says. "If you booked through a booking engine like Expedia, you can kiss any compensation goodbye. If you booked direct or through a travel advisor, your odds just went up."

While there are good things and bad things about using Expedia, one of the downsides is that you have little recourse when things go wrong. This is one situation where using an old-school travel agent to plan your trip can pay off. Still, don't expect this to turn into a windfall. "You have a case for compensation," Fricke says, "but don't expect a free stay." Instead, look for perks like comped valet parking and free breakfasts, or even discount coupons for future stays.

You're exhausted after a long flight, and the ciggy smell isn't all that bad. Why not just crash and let the front desk know about the smell in the morning? Here's why not: Because you don't want the hotel to think it was you who lit up, or to use the fact that you slept there without complaining to slip the cleaning fee onto your bill. They failed to notice the smell after the last guest checked out, but they might smell it after you do. To that end, Victoria Fricke recommends making your complaint in person at the front desk, and even videotaping your polite conversation, just to have a record of what was said and when. "Unfortunately people aren't always truthful. The guests before you as well as the hotel," Fricke explains. "If there's a problem, complain about it (nicely) immediately."

Don't worry, you won't be the first. PlanetWare's statistical analysis of 8 million Tripadvisor reviews found that the smell of cigarette smoke was the number one guest complaint. Hotels are vigilant about smoking, not just because it's a review-killer, but because the cleanup can be costly. There's the staff's time, as well as lost revenue. The room can't be rented while it's being decontaminated, and that can take up to three days. Hotels that do allow smoking pay higher insurance premiums, which is yet another reason more and more hotel chains today, like Marriott, Sheraton, Wyndham, and Comfort Inn, are 100% smoke-free. The good news is that, if you book your stay at one of those, you'll never "accidentally" be booked into a smoking room again.