Last week, a New York real estate investor strolled into Nashua, New Hampshire, and purchased one of the state's iconic hotels for just pennies on the dollar.

The castle-style Radisson Nashua, which stands like a fortress over the Everett Turnpike near the Massachusetts line, sold at auction for $5.5 million. Back in 2007, when it was known as the Sheraton Tara, the hotel was worth about four times as much. The 32-year-old, 336-room property was assessed at $16.3 million in 2009. It had outstanding mortgages of nearly $20 million.

But when the then-owner didn't pay his debts for more than a year and the hotel's condition deteriorated—it needs at least $6 million in repairs—the mortgage holder foreclosed. The hotel finally went under the hammer last week, and, as the local newspaper describes in great detail, the auctioneer couldn't even drum up an opening bid until he dropped the price to $1 million.

So what, you say? Why should you, the average business traveler, care about a side-of-the-road hotel in a not terribly important city run by a not particularly impressive hotel chain?

I'll tell you why: There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of hotels just like the Radisson Nashua. Of the 50,000 or so lodging establishments in United States, perhaps a third are in foreclosure, have changed hands under financial duress, or will hit the skids next year. And you, the hotel guest, loses as the lodging industry staggers along in a state of extended collapse worse than the nation's housing industry.

In Nashua, for example, Radisson guests were turned out into the New Hampshire winter one February morning when the then-owner abruptly shuttered the property as a negotiating ploy. In Honolulu in August, guests staggering out of the trendy nightclub inside Marriott's Edition hotel might have seen a posse of men changing locks, tearing down signs and dismissing managers. The night raiders worked for the hotel owner, who was desperate to evict Marriott and its bon vivant partner, Ian Schrager. The owner eventually changed the property's name to The Modern and put it into bankruptcy to ensure that Marriott couldn't return. Several years ago, Four Seasons posted guards at checkpoints leading to the Aviara Resort near San Diego in an unsuccessful attempt to keep the owners out and retain management of the lavish property.

Check out a slideshow of five hotels under new management.

Those are just a few of the dramatic moments in this ongoing crisis. During your travels, you may have been affected in more subtle but no less annoying ways: an elevator that doesn't work; a shuttered dining room; housekeeping that comes late or not at all; broken fixtures and battered furniture in your guestroom; or dilapidated public areas. It's all a sign of the parlous state of hotel keeping as owners and their financiers struggle to stay afloat while the hotels are underwater on mortgages, fall into foreclosure, or change hands for a fraction of the assessed value.

Just last week, the 10-year-old Westin New York at Times Square sent its $232 million loan to a special servicer. The owner, a division of the mighty Tishman Group, hopes to refinance the staggering debt on the 863-room property. Halfway across the country, a court-appointed receiver was named for the six-month-old Radisson Hotel in Menomonee Falls. The Wisconsin village provided a $17.65 million loan to finance the 135-room property, and the first payment is overdue. At the other end of the country, a receiver took over the 6-year-old JW Marriott Starr Pass Resort in Tucson, Arizona because the owner defaulted on the 575-room property's $145 million loan.

Next year is likely to be even worse. At a real estate summit in New York last month, the rating firm Realpoint estimated that $21.7 billion in mortgage-backed securities on 232 hotels come due in the next 12 months. Robert Sonnenblick, a hotel developer, suggested that only about a third of that amount will be successfully refinanced. "You're going to see a huge increase of hotel foreclosures," he predicted. It is "going to be a close-to-catastrophic problem."

By this point, you're surely wondering how we got here. The standard answers—hubris and a lagging economy—certainly apply. But so does the unique nature of the lodging industry in the 21st century.