My friend and I booked a £99 Wowcher Mystery Holiday and discovered we'd been sent to Venice. I genuinely thought we'd beaten the system. Venice! Gondolas! Aperol Spritz! Romance! Culture! It felt like we'd somehow hacked life. Reader, we had not.
After landing, we spent the day wandering around Venice, marvelling at how absurdly beautiful it is. Every corner looked like a Renaissance painting. Every canal looked like a postcard. We were already discussing how smug we'd sound telling people we'd bagged a Venetian getaway for less than the price of a weekly food shop at your local Tesco.
Then we arrived at the Club Hotel. The first red flag greeted us at reception. A woman who looked like she'd rather be literally anywhere else handed us our room key, which came attached to what can only be described as a giant teardrop-shaped plank of wood. We were then informed that we had to hand the key back in every time we left the hotel. Excellent. Nothing says "luxury city break" quite like a prison release procedure.
Upon entering the room, my stomach dropped. The kind of drop you get when you're on a rollercoaster and suddenly realise the safety bar feels a bit loose. The carpets looked like they'd been fitted around the same time Gareth Gates was topping the charts and hadn't seen a vacuum cleaner since. The whole room felt trapped in 2002, preserved like a museum exhibit dedicated to poor life choices.
Then there was the bathroom. I've stayed in budget hotels before. Nothing prepared me for this. Around the window frame was a bizarre mouldy rot situation that appeared to have actively consumed part of the wall. Rather than fixing it, the hotel seemed to have adopted a bold artistic stance and pretended it was some kind of contemporary feature wall. Look away if you have trypophobia.
The toilet was filthy. Unfortunately, the following morning I was forced to become far more acquainted with it than I ever wanted after being ill. A truly humbling experience. The hairdryer looked like it had been personally unveiled by Thomas Edison. I'm fairly certain it belonged in a museum. The bath and tiles were decorated with enough black mould to qualify as their own ecosystem.
Then came the bed. Having spotted some suspicious signs, I immediately entered full CSI mode and stripped the sheets looking for bed bugs. There were black spots on the mattress, which wasn't exactly reassuring, but thankfully no actual bugs appeared. There were, however, several mysterious stains that absolutely nobody wants to investigate further. You know the kind. The headboard was perhaps the hotel's crowning achievement. Someone had apparently looked at the carpet and thought, "Not enough of this." So they'd stuck the same carpet directly onto the wall behind the bed. This makeshift headboard was covered in brown marks and grime that looked old enough to have witnessed multiple World Cups.
At this point we requested a different room. The receptionist came upstairs to inspect our concerns. By "inspect" I mean she stared in horror at the fact I'd stripped the bed. Her primary concern wasn't the mould. It wasn't the stains. It wasn't the state of the bathroom. It was the duvet. She repeatedly explained that she had no staff available to remake the bed. I asked whether she genuinely thought the room was acceptable. She never answered. Instead, she continued to mourn the dismantled bedding like I'd vandalised a national monument. Eventually a compromise was reached: if we made the bed ourselves, she'd show us another room. Fair enough.
The second room turned out to be equally grim, but it was slightly larger and somehow felt marginally less likely to feature in a Netflix true-crime documentary. At that stage, exhausted and defeated, we took it.
My friend and I did what all great travellers do when faced with adversity: we laughed. Constantly. Because if we didn't laugh, we'd probably cry. Thankfully, I was so blackout drunk on the first night that I have absolutely no memory of sleeping in the bed, which was arguably the hotel's strongest feature.
The next morning, while staring into the abyss of the bathroom and questioning every life decision that had led me there, I found myself repeating the same phrase: "This is what you get for £99." And honestly, it is. The thing is, Venice itself was spectacular. Genuinely one of the most beautiful places I've ever visited. Every time the hotel threatened to ruin the trip, Venice would swoop in and save the day. Had the city been even slightly less magical, the Club Hotel might have single-handedly destroyed the entire holiday.
Would I do another Wowcher Mystery Holiday? Probably. Would I stay at the Club Hotel again? I'd sooner book two nights in the upside-down world from Stranger Things. Venice: 10/10. Club Hotel: proof that not all mysteries should be solved.
