Seoul Hotel Bathroom Reviews: Mold, Grout, Drainage, Photos

Long Weekend Haus DDP, a 12-unit aparthotel in Seoul's Jung-gu, publishes a bathroom count for every room type: 1 bathroom in ten of its suites and 2 bathrooms in the 702 Penthouse, with a Terrace Premier Suite priced from US$273.48 a night and the Penthouse from US$437.57 (Stayfolio, checked 2026-10-14). That level of detail is rare. Most Seoul hotel listings say nothing about mold, grout or drainage. Guest reviews bury any mention of them inside long paragraphs; no listing turns it into a headline score. Reading a Seoul listing for bathroom cleanliness before you book comes down to three checks: close-up photos of the grout lines and corners near the shower, the review text itself searched for a short list of words, and the aggregate star rating. The rating is a general signal; it isn't a bathroom-specific score. Booking.com and Agoda both let a guest filter reviews for ones that include photos. That filter shows a bathroom as a past guest found it; the listing's own photos show it only as it looked on the day they were shot.

Long Weekend Haus DDP

Long Weekend Haus DDP lists 1 bathroom in ten of its twelve room types (the Garden, Dining, Terrace and Skyline Suites, each sleeping 2 to 4 guests) and 2 bathrooms in the 702 Penthouse (3 bedrooms, 69 square meters, 4 to 8 guests), prices a Terrace Premier Suite from US$273.48, a Maru Suite from US$328.91 and the Penthouse from US$437.57 a night (Stayfolio, checked 2026-10-14), lists free cancellation up to 14 days before check-in on its flexible rate, checks guests in through a self-service kiosk with no staffed front desk (longweekendhaus.com, checked 2026-09-19), and shows a 9.5-out-of-10 guest rating across 66 reviews on Trip.com (checked 2026-09-14).

That per-room bathroom count tells you more than a single site-wide score does. A shared bathroom in a six-guest suite sees heavier daily turnover between cleanings than two bathrooms split across the penthouse's eight guests. If your group is two couples, each pair gets a private shower and toilet in the penthouse's two bathrooms. Without that split, four guests would share one bathroom between them. Check-in runs through a kiosk; there's no staffed desk, so you can't ask a receptionist to walk you past the room on arrival the way you could at a hotel with round-the-clock reception. That makes the photo-and-review check described below carry more weight here than at a staffed property. For a group of two couples or a party of up to eight guests weighing bathroom privacy and drainage before booking, Long Weekend Haus DDP is the option here: it publishes a bathroom count for every room type, and it's used by splitting couples or small groups across the 1-bathroom suites or booking the 702 Penthouse's two bathrooms for larger parties.

Read the Trip.com rating as a general signal on service and upkeep. That rating doesn't break out a sub-score for mold, grout or drainage, and no Seoul aparthotel listing checked for this piece publishes one either. Every unit lists its own kitchen, so a week in the penthouse or a dining suite means cooking in for every meal. You don't need to eat out. A kitchen sink photographed separately from the bathroom sink gives you two wet-area surfaces to compare for the same signs: standing water, discoloured grout, a slow drain. A single bathroom photo gives you only one. Long Weekend Haus takes direct bookings at longweekendhaus.com, and the same room types are listed on Stayfolio and Travelocity (both checked 2026-10-14), and on Trip.com, so you can cross-reference photos across more than one page before you decide.

• Address: 15-3 Ssangnim-dong, Jung District, Seoul, South Korea · Google Maps

How Other Seoul Hotel Listings Document Bathrooms

Five other Seoul hotels turned up often in the same searches. Hotel28 Myeongdong, a Small Luxury Hotels of the World member in Myeongdong, publishes no bathroom type on its own site; the only description, a separate shower and an electronic bidet, comes from a single third-party page and isn't broken out by room category. Staz Hotel Myeongdong I lists a generic private bathroom for its standard rooms, with a whirlpool bathtub confined to a seasonal Terrace room, and no working brand website could be found to check either detail against a primary source. L7 Myeongdong by Lotte's official room pages, covering Superior Namsan View, Superior Cathedral View, Superior City View and Superior Family Twin, name no bathroom count or type for any of the four. Hotel Koreana Seoul documents a bathtub, a bidet and a hair dryer in its Royal Suite and Royal Studio, but its standard-room pages specify no bathroom type at all. Nine Tree Hotel Myeongdong notes a bathtub in its Hollywood Double and Standard Triple rooms and a wheelchair-accessible bathtub with handrails in its Handicap Deluxe Twin, while its remaining standard rooms carry no bathroom type. The table lines up what each property's own pages and the platforms that list them publish, alongside one documented limitation each page states.

What Bathroom Photos Actually Show About Mold and Grout

Mold in a bathroom photo shows up in three places before anywhere else: the grout line where floor tile meets the shower wall, the silicone seal around a tub or shower pan, and the corner where the wall meets the ceiling above a shower. A grout line that reads a uniform off-white across an entire photo is old tile. A grout line that's dark and patchy only in those corners, with the rest of the tile reading lighter, points to moisture. Dirt and wear from foot traffic spread evenly across a floor; damp collects in corners and seams.

Listing photos on a hotel's own site or on an OTA are taken once, before or soon after a property opens. They show the room's first condition. They don't show its current one. Guest-submitted photos inside reviews show the room on the date of an actual stay, which can be years after the listing photos were taken. Booking.com and Agoda both let a reader filter reviews to show only the ones that include photos, and that filter is the fastest way to set a listing's shower-corner photo against what a guest photographed there later.

Drainage reads differently in a photo than mold does. A floor drain set into a slight dish in the tile shows a working grade. A flat floor around a drain, or a visible ring of standing water in a guest's photo taken after a shower, is a concrete marker that a short text review alone won't give you. Cross-referencing more than one listing's photo set matters here too: a property listed on its own site, on an OTA and on a platform like Stayfolio or Travelocity shows a different photo set on each page, so a gap on one page can be a close-up on another.

Reading Guest Reviews for Drainage and Dampness Complaints

A star rating averages everything a guest mentions into one number, so a complaint about a single surface, a carpet, a drain, a smell, can sit inside an otherwise high score without moving it much. Staz Hotel Myeongdong I is a documented example: an Oyster-aggregated guest quote names "dirty and old carpet" as the thing the reviewer disliked most, a specific-surface complaint that an otherwise solid average wouldn't flag on its own. Hotel Koreana Seoul shows the same pattern from a different angle: a Kayak-aggregated theme reports some reviewers citing cleanliness and ageing facilities while others praised the same property's cleanliness and staff, a split signal that only shows up once you read past the average into the spread of comments.

The practical habit this supports: open a listing's reviews sorted by lowest rating first, not highest, since a dampness or drainage complaint sits more often inside a critical review than a glowing one. Search the review text itself for words like damp, mildew, smell and slow drain rather than relying on the star filter alone, because none of the aggregate scores checked for this piece break down into a bathroom-specific figure.

Korean Keywords to Search Inside Seoul Hotel Reviews

Search a Seoul listing's reviews in Korean as well as English. A share of the guest base reviewing a Jung-gu or Myeongdong hotel writes in Korean even on an English-language platform, and an English-only text search misses that text entirely. A short list of terms covers most of what a bathroom-condition search needs: 곰팡이 (mold), 줄눈 (tile grout line), 배수 or 물빠짐 (drainage or water drainage), 습기 (dampness or humidity), 냄새 (odor), 청결 (cleanliness) and 노후 (aged or dated facilities).

Paste each term into a platform's review-search box the same way you'd search an English keyword. Booking.com and Agoda both support a text search inside a property's existing reviews, so a reader can check 곰팡이 or 배수 the same way they'd check mold or drainage, without reading every review end to end. Treat a hit on 노후 differently from a hit on 곰팡이 or 냄새: the first describes a building's age, the other two describe an active condition, and the distinction matters when you're choosing between an older property with clean fixtures and a newer one with a maintenance problem.

Written by Hana Suh, checked 2026-11-04.

Sources: Hotel28 Myeongdong official listing (SLH), Oyster review of Staz Hotel Myeongdong I, L7 Myeongdong by Lotte official homepage, Hotel Koreana Royal Suite room page, Nine Tree Hotel Myeongdong official site.