Hotels That Became Infamous: Hans Brinker to the Cecil
What happens when a hotel becomes famous for being awful? This episode explores the strange spectrum of notorious lodging — from the Hans Brinker in Amsterdam, which turned its own one-star reviews into a marketing strategy ("It's clean, it's cheap, it's not a Hilton"), to the Hotel Cecil in downtown San Diego, where decades of deaths and the 2013 Elisa Lam case made a building into a permanent character in internet lore. Along the way: why funny-badness sells and sad-badness doesn't, how the review economy can work as free advertising, and why infamy and survival rarely travel together. The…
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