Hotel rooms should be quiet, romantic, and super clean, but let’s face it— even the priciest of accommodations rarely hit those three marks. Personally, we’d trade in “quiet” and “romantic” for a spot-free suite any day, but unfortunately, we’ve yet to walk into a truly clean hotel room. Don’t believe us? Just try out our grime test and you’ll see what we mean…

It goes without saying that hotels are a very necessary and convenient part of life, so we just deal with the dirt and perform some wipe downs – usually on the remote control and bathroom sink first! – but recently we learned that we had been neglecting the most bacteria-laden part of the room: the hair dryer.

According to an undercover assignment performed by ABC News, reporters found that hotel room hair dryers are filthy. In fact, the news organization hired a microbiologist to test these common appliances, and his findings literally made us shudder. Apparently, the hair dryers tested were some of the dirtiest things he could find in the hotel rooms!

Now, it’s important to note that ABC News wasn’t just surveying your typical roach motels; they purposely focused on ones priced from $98 all the way up to $500 per night. Quite a big chunk of change for a dirty hotel room, if you ask us!

The one item in a hotel room you should NEVER use

Over the years, we’ve provided you with plenty of helpful hotel-related tips, including insider info on how to get the best deals, but the best advice we think you could use for your next hotel stay is really quite simple. In fact, it just involves avoiding one item: water glasses.

A while back, we covered another news exposé that focused on hotel room dishware—and boy did it make us want to pack along plastic cups for our next trip, because the team found some super unhealthy evidence.

News station WAGA placed hidden cameras in several Atlanta-area hotel rooms to get a better idea of how thoroughly they were (or weren’t!) being cleaned. While the maids seemed to do a fine job on the essentials, like the bed and the floors, they didn’t treat the dishware with the same care.

If the glasses were cleaned at all, they were scrubbed down with glass cleaner, a chemical solution that is obviously not intended for human consumption. In one case, a maid cleaned the glass while wearing the same gloves that she wore to clean the toilet!

Disturbing stuff, but perhaps not entirely surprising. We always were a bit suspicious when it came to those glasses—but hair dryers? We had no idea!

To get the full scoop on this grungy hotel room item, as well as a PRICELESS—and oh-so disgusting—quote from the microbiologist who examined the dirty appliances, be sure to watch the video below. We think we’ll pack along our own hair dryers next time!

We can’t wait to hear your take on these surprisingly grungy hotel items. Are you surprised that hair dryers harbor so many germs? Have you ever encountered a particularly grimy hotel room? If so, did you complain to the staff?