Most jobs that involve other human beings end up being factories for good stories – and by good, I mean interesting, not really good. You understand.
People who work in hotels see all sorts of clients, day and night, like a revolving door. As you’ll see by these 18 memories, there’s really no judging a book by it’s cover – and no way to know what you’re going to find in a room until you unlock that door.
18. A rare happy ending.
I worked security for a while at a really large hotel. Two stand out in my mind. The first, a guest that went out by ambulance because of some “allergic reaction” (what the guest claimed at least). The room was full of black and bloody diarrhea. The smell was horrible, I have never smelled sh%t like that and hope to never again gag.
The second wasn’t something left but a assistance call. Elderly man was unresponsive when we got there. We used a defibrillator on him till the ambulance arrived and he actually survived. He came back to the hotel some months later to thank us, it was great. Most of those calls didn’t end well so having one who survived and came back to say hey was nice.
17. Who thinks cleanup is included?
It was a family retreat/kids birthday party. The adults were getting sh%*faced while the kids were in the presidential suite raising hell. They had decided to have a fully stocked ice cream bar and allowed the kids to do what they wanted with it.
M&Ms crushed into the carpet, chocolate footprints on the walls, whipped cream fucking everywhere. Fruit punch spilled on the bed.
In total we had to charge them about $7k in damages, which they took to court, because they thought “The Cleanup would be included, that’s why we did it at a hotel!”
They also smashed glass all over our dog hiking trail, which I had to clean up.
16. Baffling is one word for it.
I was in housekeeping for a while in the winter and a co-worker of mine found a poop in a condom tied to the microwave door.
Definitely the most baffling thing I’d heard of anyone finding.
15. Just what on earth?
It’s late evening, and a woman comes angrily in to our lobby from the pool with three children and says, “You guys need to do something about what’s going on out there,” and gestures to the pool area. I look at her inquisitively and she just says, “Go look, you’ll see.”
I walk outside and it’s pretty immediately clear the couple in the hot tub are “discreetly” having s^x.
I approach just enough to get their attention and say, “Hi guys, I know everyone’s here to have a good time tonight, but we got a complaint about some hot and heavy activity in the hot tub.” They’re clearly intoxicated, but apologize and say it will stop.
A few minutes later, the phone rings. It’s the woman who complained before calling from her room which faces the pool. “They’re still at it. You need to do something. Children are staying in this hotel.”
I go back outside and sure enough, now that the spectators are gone, they’re f**king it out in the hot tub.
I go back out, tell them to get out. They start giving me the story: it’s their anniversary, they’re very sorry, we won’t have any more problems with them, etc etc. I foolishly let them stay in the hot tub.
10 minutes later: phone rings. “Seriously!!?” Same lady. I look out the window, they’re both totally naked. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’ve warned them, I’m calling the police.
Police arrive and head out to the pool. The officer handles it like a pro. He’s very nice, let’s them know that it’s inappropriate, but he doesn’t want to ruin what’s clearly a fun weekend for them both, but they need to go to their room and not come out for the rest of the night. They are to stay in their room until tomorrow morning. No excuses. The couple thanks him for his understanding and promises they’ll behave and stay in their room.
The officer and I wind up chatting and laughing about it all and he asks if he can grab a cup of coffee in our lobby while he fills out his report. Of course he can.
He’s sitting in the Lobby, I’m back to work, and I hear him say, “Oh, you’ve got to be f**king kidding me!!” I’m shocked at the broken quietness as I see him jump up and exit the Lobby…
Right to the hot tub, where the same couple is back in the hot tub making out. (I can only assume they took the stairs at the end of the hall out to the parking lot and around to the pool.)
Arrested them both. They came back Monday afternoon (they were arrested on Friday night) to collect their property.
14. Who would waste good pizza like that?
Pizza. And not just like leftovers. An entire pizza. And not a single slice of it in the box.
The first red flag we found was the slice of pizza smeared all over on the TV. Then we saw two slices side by side like they had worn them for slippers and dragged their feet across the floor. One slice in the dresser, one in the nightstand, one in the sheets, and one in the bathroom sink.
We cleaned the room as normal and put all the pizza in the box. The whole time I’m wondering why someone would do this, was the pizza not good? Was one slice enough and you had to buy the whole thing? I’m doing the final checks in the room and it still smells like pizza. I flick the lamp on and look for the final slice. I finally find it, shadowed in the lamp shade. This individual had smeared the last slice on the inside of the lamp shade.
That was the final piece of the puzzle (or pizzazule).
This person bought an entire pizza just to hide it in his hotel room.
13. An actual animal.
A bear.
Our lowest floor, was still about a meter and a half from the ground, and each outside room had a balcony rail.
However, a guest had decided to want to unload his motorcycle from his truck and leave the ramp down, so (I’m assuming) he could ride the bike up when he was done.
The guest that was staying in the room had room service, decided to leave the food uncovered and the balcony doors open, and later went to the hotel pool/spa to relax.
Upon returning, they had gone to us at reception and said that there was a bear in the room.
Puzzled, we quietly approached the room and slowly opened the door. Lo and behold, there was a bear eating room service and making a mess of my afternoon.
We called Parks Canada to deal with it.
Guest was not charged a cleaning fee.
12. Yikes.
A dead body… someone ended up killing themselves in the hotel room by hanging themselves in the closet. Was in there a few days before we found him….
11. Honestly that’s a good rule.
A bachelorette party came through and after they left the next night we had a new rule that charges a $400 glitter fee. But I mean you couldn’t see the floor so much glitter.
It’s been a few years and you can probably still find glitter in the carpet throughout the hotel.
10. They did it twice.
25 years ago I worked at a snooty part of a snooty ski resort in Park City, Utah. Most of the regular guests were just typical old rich white dudes, but during Sundance season though, the celebrities come out.
There is a certain musician, entertaining us for decades now, who has a disgusting hobby. Or did in the early 90s at least.
Next time you’re cuttin Footloose, or gettin close to the Danger Zone, just know that Kenny Loggins gives his entire family coffee-ground enemas, which leaves a giant mess, and leaves it for the hotel staff to clean up. Twice in one stay.
9. I have a lot of questions.
Woman with mysophobia (fear of germs) stayed with us.
She never let the cleaning ladies into the room as she preferred to clean it herself. One day she leaves to go out and removes the do disturb sign.
Maid calls down and says the room has a strong chemical odor and found bags of pee and poop in the drawers.
8. The saddest stories of the bunch.
A couple came to the desk early in the AM, they clearly had been in an all out fist fight. They were a cash paying customer and all they said was, “sorry, we got in a fight, there is blood in the room, we are HIV positive.” Then they took off. Room was an absolute horror show, had to hire special cleaners to come gut the room and ended up replacing basically everything in the room. Room was OOC for almost a year.
Same hotel, we had some wards of the state types staying. Worst were a couple with a newborn. They couldn’t afford basically anything, so made the decision to use our towels as diapers. The state wouldn’t let us kick them out and they were just taking the towels off the carts. Ended up having to evict them from the hotel as they had been there long enough to establish residency…
7. A horror story.
Three guys in one room left ALL of their windows open and lights on overnight in the summer.
I have never seen so many different types of bug flying around the room, it was terrifying. We ran in spraying bug killer like our lives depended on it, then ran out and left the room for an hour.
We can back to a floor that was almost black with dead bugs. I can still hear the crunching.
6. I’m never touching anything in a hotel room again.
Someone pooped in the nightstand. It had been there long enough to dry out, so it took nearly an hour to scrub it clean.
Another room had bloody menstrual pads stuck all over the walls at random.
5. Even the dog?
Found bloody parrot feathers all over a room. They claimed it was service animal (it wasn’t) and had gotten too stressed and pulled all of its plumage out. The guest tried to blame the hotel for noise. We charged them for the cleanup.
Was balancing month end one day when the front was swarmed with police cars. They raided a room with no notice to us at the front desk. Turned out a pimp was cooking meth in one of rooms with two prostitutes and a dog. There was a short standoff before everyone was arrested. Their car was seemingly forgotten about in the parking lot, but it disappeared a week later. We were unable to charge for damages since all of their cards were stolen.
4. When it’s not what you think.
It was a hallway. I worked the front desk. A little league baseball team was staying the night and a guest complained to my manager about bats flying around.
My manager assumed the baseball team was just being roudy and headed up to tell them to calm down.
Turns out it wasn’t baseball bats… Just a normal ol’ flying bat hanging out in the hallway.
3. Appearances can be deceiving.
I worked at a hotel a few years ago, front desk. I checked out a nice couple in the morning, they were very friendly, said they enjoyed their stay. Then housekeeping got to their room, the poor woman looked shell-shocked.
I got to go through the room with a camera and my supervisor to document the state of the room. 2 large, black, double headed d**dos, lots of ziploc baggies with powdery residue, syringes (some used, some still with caps on them, including 2 in the toilet), and more travel sized bottles of baby oil than I could count.
We also found what appeared to be feces and blood smeared all over the bedding and walls and a small digital camera. Police were called, descriptions of them taken, and all their information they had used to check in.
I quit soon after, so I don’t know if they ever found them or pressed charges.
2. That’s traumatizing.
A syringe under a mattress, AFTER I felt a prick on the end of my finger. I was tucking in a sheet under the bed, and there were actually two uncovered “insulin” needles under there.
I got rushed to hospital; hepatitis shots and a tetanus shot, two different hiv prevention medication for a month, monthly blood tests for about a year.
I’m fine, and it barely stuck me in truth, but I was already afraid of needles and disease I still feel traumatized. I was not going to post at all, but I’ve always wondered if there was anything else I should have done. The doctors assured me that they were more precautious than necessary.
1. Some people really aren’t that bright.
I’ve worked night audit at a couple hotels for a few years now, and I’ve got a couple of stories of nastiness left behind in rooms.
The first story happened about a week after I started working night audit. This guy who was staying on our first floor, had decided to go outside to smoke in only a towel. His towel apparently became stuck in the door, and in a genius move, he grabbed the smokers pole and busted out the window to his room. When he climbed in, he cut himself badly enough that he bled all over the room. The shower curtain, bedding and a couple of pillowcases had to be sent out to be professionally cleaned, and the rest of the room had to be professionally cleaned.
The hotel charged him with the cost of the window, the cost of the cleanings, and for every night the room was out of order, which was about a month. During cleanup, one of our houseman got cut by the glass in the window, and had to get treated in case of blood borne disease, and get stitches. The guest paid for all that too. The cost was around $10k for everything, and he was banned from the property forever. He tried to come in again about a year later with a third party reservation, and our GM personally waited for him and escorted him off the property.
The second story is about a man who we called ‘Huge James’. Huge James is literally the fattest man I have ever seen. He’s pretty tall, and easily at 4-500lbs. In his room, are his wife, his daughters, and himself. The women in the family were all normal size. This family quickly developed a bad reputation with our pizza chains that delivered, because they would order a lot of pizza and never tip the driver. The drivers would come down and complain to me or other front desk staff about this. It got to the point where the dominos drivers would just give us the pizzas to take up to their room.
Huge James and his family never let housekeeping in for about a week, and when they finally were allowed in, there was so much trash from fast food and pizza, that they had begun to stuff it under the beds. What is worse is that Huge James was physically too big to use the toilet in the room (we have rooms with reinforced toilets, so we absolutely could have accommodated him), so he had defecated in the tub. He then would use our nice white hotel towels to wipe himself, and just leave it on the floor. Nobody knew about the towels until our laundry lead, Miss Brenda (the sweetest and nicest little woman I know) found them herself. We had to throw the towels away, and we nearly lost Miss Brenda that day as well.
While that was going on in the laundry room, one of our housekeepers was cleaning the room and noticed a towel tucked into the side of one of the beds. She pulled the towel out and a giant dildo came flying out with the towel. I saw the pictures of it, and end to end, it was almost as wide as the towel it was covered with. In addition to this, there were stains all over the mattress that had soaked through the sheets and onto the mattress. In the bathroom, the tub wasn’t draining, and when they pulled the stopper mechanism out to try and clear the blockage, a lot of poop came with it, and that’s how we knew they were shoving the poop down the shower drain.
During this time, they had been staying on a third party reservation and making a new reservation every few days. When the new reservation popped up in our system after discovering what they had done to the room, the GM decided to evict them. Huge James came down and started screaming at the front desk supervisor about how the mess wasn’t his fault and that it was retarded daughter doing all that, and making the messes, and defecating in the tub.
Those were his exact words, and how he talked about his daughter if that helps you understand what kind of a person he really was. Everyone had met his wife and daughters, and they were really nice people, so we didn’t believe him when he made claims that his daughter was the one making the messes.
Huge James drove a lifted Hummer with huge chromed our rims, and the night before his eviction, I jotted down his license plate number in case he tried to pull something before he left (he did). When he found out that he was no longer allowed on the property, he trashed his room and smeared all the sauce packets from fast food and actual food on the walls, the tv, and the windows. They found food between the mattresses, and the bed frames had been broken. When it was time for him to go, we had police there to escort them off the property.
After they left, all the damage was found in the room, and because I had the license plate number, they were found and charged with vandalism (I think) and we took them to court for the damage to room. It came out in court that it was actually him that was defecating in the tub, and he destroyed the room before they left.
I’m floored, y’all. Like. What are y’all up to out there?
If you’ve ever worked in a hotel, add your story to the heap down in the comments!
