Our cockroach nightmare at Tradewinds Apartment Hotel in Miami Beach

Please consider this warning before you book a room at Tradewinds Apartment Hotel in Miami Beach. Some of their rooms are infested with cockroaches!

We caught and photographed one of the cockroaches in our room at Tradewinds Apartment Hotel in Miami Beach.

Tradewinds Apartment Hotel is part of South Beach Group, which operates a number of hotels in Miami Beach. Hopefully they're not all infested with cockroaches. 

We stayed at Tradewinds Apartment Hotel in Miami Beach in the fall of 2017. It was one of our worst hotel experiences ever, and we have a very hard time believing that many of their online reviews are genuine.

Our room at Tradewinds Apartment Hotel was completely infested with cockroaches. The whole unit had a constant chemical smell, so I think think they had tried to exterminate the cockroaches earlier, but it had clearly not succeeded.

This alone is enough to give Tradewinds Apartment Hotel the lowest grade possible. But it didn’t end there. The staff at Tradewinds Apartment Hotel showed complete disregard for our saftey and well being. Having vermin in a place where you sleep and cook food is unsanitary and can be a health hazard.

Any responsible hotel manager should go into crisis mode when something like this happens. But this was not the case at Tradewinds apartment hotel in Miami Beach. We actually had to sleep in this room our first night there, even though Tradewinds is part of a hotel chain called South Beach Group, where they could have made an internal emergency arrangement at a different hotel within South Beach Group. They didn’t want to do that at their expense.

The staff at Tradewinds Apartment Hotel did however promise us a new room the next day, but  then backed out and said they were fully booked, even hough they had said something completely different only 8 hours earlier.  We went online and found several vacant rooms/units, so they were clearly lying straight to our faces. We confronted them with this fact, and when pushed, they finally admitted there were five vacancies at Tradewinds Apartment Hotel that very same day.

We were absolutely disgusted with their behaviour at thais point. Our jaws dropped to the floor when the manager's assistant flat out admitted that she was holding on to the the 5 vacant rooms in hope of them being booked during the course of the day. She would rather have us stay in the cockroach infested unit for the time being (and maybe if one of the 5 vacant room weren’t booked during the day, she’d let us have it).

After much discussion we finally did get a a new room/unit, but we discovered cockroaches in that room as well. At this point we lost confidence that another room switch would solve the cockroach problem. It seemed obvious that Tradewinds Apartment Hotel  was completely infested with cockroaches, and they were probably present in almost every room (to some degree).

We caught and killed one of the cockroaches to be able to document it all and show the staff in case they didn’t believe us. We also took some pictures. At this point we thought we would be able to switch to another hotel within South Beach Group for sure. Once again the staff at Tradewinds were not willing to  arrange a switch to one of their sister hotels in Miami Beach at their expense.  

We only had a few days left on our vacation and decided to make the best of the situation, and to publish this review of Tradewinds Apartment Hotel as warning to others.