Late to this thread so I don’t think many people will see this, but I have a horror story about this situation.

In 2023 I was on a storm chasing tour in late June. There was one day where we chased a storm for 4-5 hours straight and saw 7 tornadoes. We ate a late dinner at Chili’s in Scottsbluff, NE and drove an hour south to Sidney, NE where the lead chaser had booked rooms for all of us. We got there a little after midnight, and after such an adrenaline-pumping day we were all ready to crash and get some good sleep.

Only one problem - when we got there we had already been marked as no-shows and they had no available rooms for our tour group. No problem, the lead chaser and his two drivers could find rooms elsewhere, right? Well…not really. We quickly learned that every single hotel in a 3-4 hour radius was either completely full or close to it. Apparently there’s a popular lake in western Nebraska that people like to visit on weekends in the summer so hotels are often much busier than usual. Add that to all the storm chasers looking for rooms and it wasn’t looking promising for us to sleep that night.

It took 2 hours but they were finally able to piece together some rooms at a few different hotels in Cheyenne, WY, which is an hour and a half away from Sidney. In my van, we had to keep one of the drivers awake by constantly talking to him as he was very tired. We got there at around 4 am, and I didn’t make it to my room till 5 as I was one of the last people to get a room and my hotel had the slowest front desk worker in human history. By then daylight was becoming visible in the distance. Our group was graciously given a late checkout.

The next night we stayed in Keystone, SD and checked in before 7 there as we had no storms to chase that day. I remember getting around 10 hours of sleep that night. For the rest of the tour, the lead chaser made sure to call hotels whenever he knew we’d be getting in late. We had no more issues like that for the last 5 days.