Hotels in the South Caroline tourist mecca of Myrtle Beach racked up the most negative reviews in the new study. Credit: Shutterstock / Fedor Bychkov

San Antonio may advertise itself as a “world-class” tourist destination, but some travelers apparently think our hotels don’t live up to that claim.

A new study ranked San Antonio as having nation’s the sixth-worst hotels based on their number of lousy ratings on TripAdvisor. Some 16% of all reviews for SA hotels landed one- or two-star reviews on the widely used travel site.

To compile its rankings for the study, online travel blog PlanetWare analyzed 7.8 million reviews left on TripAdvisor for more than 9,000 hotels in 95 cities.

The South Carolina tourist mecca of Myrtle Beach had the worst hotels on average, with 20% of all reviews on TripAdvisor being negative, according to the analysis. Atlantic City, New Jersey, took the No. 2 spot, and Virginia Beach came in at No. 3.

South Padre Island was the only other Texas travel destination in the top 10, coming in at No. 5.

Nationally, the most common hotel-related complaints are the smell of cigarette smoke, lack of toilet paper, bed bugs and thin walls, according to the report. Even so, PlanetWare wrote that the study doesn’t mean all the hotels in a poorly ranked city are bed bug-infested hell holes.

“Don’t despair if you have a favorite hotel in one of these cities — you may have just found a diamond in the rough,” the report notes.

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This article appears in May 3-16, 2023.

Michael Karlis is a multimedia journalist at the San Antonio Current, whose coverage in print and on social media focuses on local and state politics. He is a graduate of American University in Washington,...