A regular visitor to this site is an expert on water damage and the residual “stuff”  that comes with it, and offers this treatise on water damage and the sometimes glib attitude that hotels have towards it:

Like you I travel extensively.  I should be around 250 nights in a hotel this year.  Unlike you I travel with an infrared camera.  These cameras have a variety of uses, we sell $1.5B a year, and one use is locating water.  This is easy for an IR camera: when water evaporates the temperature drops and a very distinctive pattern emerges.

There are many water leaks each week in major hotels.  The Renaissance Denver got flooded last summer when a school group of brats overflowed tubs.  I was there the week after and took images for the Hotel Manager.  We do lots of business there.  They are pro-active in
maintenance there and always a pleasure to stay.

Water is a problem because if it isn’t removed promptly mold will grow.  Before the tornado the Embassy Suites hotel at the airport in St Louis was the most extensively water damaged, mold contaminated building I have ever stayed in.  Virtually every employee was sick.  I complained to the hotel manager – we had water pouring into the room.  He said he had no money for maintenance.  I complained to Hilton Corporation.  They referred me to the hotel manager.  I refuse to stay at Hilton’s now.  I have been a Marriott Platinum Premier for life for quite some
time (

I was teaching a class – that’s what I do – at Bally’s in Las Vegas.  What started as a drip on Tuesday afternoon in our meeting room resulted in a ceiling collapse Thursday.  The morons running that dump were kept up to date with the leak and didn’t do anything about it.  I came off the rails on them over that and never paid my $14K catering bill.  Two months later I checked and the leak was still occurring!  I turned in my Diamond players card and haven’t dropped a nickel in a Caesars property since.

As veteran travelers we know how good and how bad places can be.  Thanks for the website!  Some of the images crack me up!  I will be sending
in more.