Hotel Impossible is Plenty Binge Worthy

Guilty pleasure TV binge? Yep, I have one. Or did, since I streamed all the episodes available and then was forced to quit cold turkey, all the while lamenting the loss of pure brain-cell killing television watching.

Hotel Impossible, starring Anthony Melchiorri, was a tremendous way to spend (some might say waste) I don’t know how many hours of my life. It was good for laughs, shock, and maybe even a tear or two.

If you’re not familiar with this show, the premise is this: hotels that are failing, in serious trouble, and at high risk of going out of business call in expert Anthony Melchiorri to help them get on the right track.

You might think that sounds not all that interesting, and at first so did I. But that’s how bored I was one day—enough to watch the first episode. And an obsession was created.

Two things make this show incredibly binge worthy: the hotels/owners/managers and Melchiorri.

It’s mind-boggling to me how some of the “hoteliers” (and I use the word loosely) featured in this show ran and presented their hotel to their customers. I’ve never been in the hospitality business unless a couple stints as a waitress count, but I know enough to know that cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, dirty sheets on the bed, burned out light bulbs, mold in the shower, dead bugs everywhere, and hair in the sink (to name just a few) are not conducive to a great experience for guests. And yet these are the kinds of things every episode of Hotel Impossible exposed to viewers and potential guests.

To make matters worse, most of the owners or managers of these hotels appear to not realize or care that these things might be a turn off and part of the reason their business is falling off, and they’re getting bad reviews.

In just about every episode there was something that made me cringe or cover my eyes (or both), or scream out loud “oh how gross!” or “how could you not know that?” There was lots of eye rolling, head shaking, and heavy sighing.

Even now, thinking about it, it’s hard to imagine how owners could be so clueless and careless. It really did seem like some of these hotels were impossible to fix. I know this sounds like something you wouldn’t want to watch, but it was weirdly compelling.

Then there’s hotel consultant Anthony Melchiorri, a small, bald, bespectacled and well-dressed man, who, on the surface, seems polite and non-threatening. This is a ruse. The sugar coating on a hard-calling, in-your-face, my-way-or-the-highway ball of fire.

When Anthony sees something that just isn’t right, he lets the owners know. Often in a very loud voice. He screams, he waves his arms, he even stomps his feet sometimes. It’s pretty funny to see him go off, and to see the looks on the faces of the people he’s going off on. And if they don’t accept personal responsibility for it? Beware.

The whole thing would be pretty funny, if it weren’t so disgusting, and gross, and just plain awful. And there’s eight seasons of it! But, like I said before, compelling binge-worthy television. Once I sat down and turned it on, it was hours before I’d get up again.

By the time I had watched the whole first season, I was able to predict some of the things that were going to set Anthony off when he did his walkthrough, and I was always pretty close, but of course, he always found many things I missed.

Did you know there are bedbug detecting dogs? Neither did I until I saw them on Hotel Impossible. They’re apparently the most effective way of detecting bedbugs.

I learned a lot of other things, too, that I will take with me the next time I stay in a hotel—any hotel. I’ll be doing a little Anthony-type clean check of my room before I get too comfortable.

Of course, by the end of each episode, Anthony and hotel management have made nice, and they fix the place up and correct the problems and the dump is given a new life, and that’s interesting to watch, especially as there’s also an update from a couple months later on to let us know how the business is doing.

I looked up some of the most memorable hotels after watching their episode to see what they were up to and if they’d kept the place up in the spirit of the show, and most of them had, so that’s a good sign.

I’m not sure why Hotel Impossible interested me, but it did, and I was sad for it to be over. But all is not lost, because I recently discovered a show called Bar Rescue, which does the same thing with bars, and is every bit as entertaining as Hotel Impossible.