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After spending 10 years working in the hotel business I have witnessed some horrible, disgusting and absolutely hilarious things. As the manager it's my job to make the guests feel welcome and safe while staying on our properties, which sometimes means kicking the worst of the people out. Tell me your horror stories whether it's from the guests point of view or an employees point of view and how the issue got resolved. I'll start. One night while helping the new night auditor pull guest folios to correct mistakes made by the day time desk clerk we got a call, "FrontDesk, this is Alex! How may I help you?" "Sir, Alex, Sir, could you bring some towels up to our room? Those idiot housekeepers forgot to stock us up!". Bringing the night auditor with me to show her how to execute such a task in a professional manner, I make my way to the guest room. We arrive, knock on the door and it swings open. Guest- "Heeeelllooo hot stuff" the 50 year old woman screams drunkenly into my face, completely nude. Showing off her fur burger with a side of........well...saggy breasts. I hand her the towels and notice that there were 2 old men making out nude on the bed behind her. Not Okay! She promptly tells me that she didn't actually need the towels but more or less wanted to see if I was free to join in, and now if the night auditor wanted to join in that would be cool too! Quickly making up an excuse as to why I didn't want to be sandwiched between 2 old men, a grandma and now my new night auditor, going through the normal routine "I see you're enjoying your stay, is there anything I can get you that's not sexual and if so, please don't be naked" and walking away with the least amount of erection i've ever had in my life, I had finally realized why the manager before me was an alcoholic. The next day I explained to the woman that if anymore sexual harassment occurred from their party that they would be asked to leave the property and blacklisted from our others. Has anybody here had an experience like this? How did it get resolved??? GorillaMan! fucked around with this message at 10:17 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 10:06
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I had a similar thing happen, but I hosed the old men and women all in their butts
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Mar 5, 2015 13:42
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Howard Johnson, Raleigh, NC, 2 am. Was doing a cross-country move, and I pull in with the 30 foot moving truck towing the pickup truck that had my cat in it, and there was another car full of my buddies helping me move. It's 2am, had been a long day, and we were beat. We check in and hit our rooms. What a shithole. Since it was a bunch of guys the front desk must have decided we were there for the gay orgy, so we got the gay orgy rooms. Condom wrappers on the floor by the bed. Bed looked slightly disheveled. Remote was missing... and found under the bedspread missing the batteries and battery cover. Water droplets in sink, other signs of, "This room has been used recently." We have a meeting, 2:30 am by now and we decide we are just too damned tired to pick up and move the trucks and find another place in a strange city 3 hours before the sun comes up, so we settle in. Then the bugs came out of the hole in the wall and started crawling all over the walls. I just said gently caress IT, pulled the bed away from the wall, and racked out for a few hours. We were back on the road by 7am.
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Mar 5, 2015 18:30
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During a trip down almost the entire East Coast, I stayed in a non-chain motel somewhere in NC. The toilet seat in the room was too small for the toilet itself. It was really weird, but the room seemed clean enough. If it hadn't then I would have gone somewhere else. Pixelated Dragon fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 19:04
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GORDON posted:Howard Johnson, Raleigh, NC, 2 am. That's disgusting, I slept in a van in the middle winter once for a similar reason, except it was mice. Pixelated Dragon posted:During a trip down almost the entire East Coast, I stayed in a non-chain motel somewhere in NC. Our maintenance guy tried to do that to a toilet once, he had no excuse other than not feeling like wasting a 10 minute drive to the hardware store. He was eventually fired for doing pretty much the same offense, like sixteen times.
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Mar 5, 2015 23:02
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Just recently stayed at a hotel called "upsky". My SO booked it for a wedding we were supposed to go to, not realizing the hotel was ~30 miles from the reception, so we had to take a cab there and back, and was about $50 each way, but that was not the bad part. The hotel seemed pretty nice at first, and about par for the course for $100/night hotels. Fast forward to about 4AM the night after the wedding reception, probably still drunk/fading in to a hangover, and the fire alarm goes off, and it's a talking one that says to please evacuate. gently caress, absolutely the worst time possible. Well we get dressed and start heading out of the room, when a voice comes on a speaker saying "false alarm, return to your rooms". So we go back in bed but the alarm does not stop! Finally after ~2 hours it stops. As soon as I fall asleep it starts again but only for about 2-5 minutes. This repeats every 10-20 minutes until about 9:30AM and checkout was at 11. So just as I fall back to sleep, the alarm blares again, repeat this many times. Absolutely the worst sleep I've ever had and I was hungover to boot. When we check out, we obviously demand a refund, but they claimed "no refunds due to safety systems in the hotel". Well what if there was an actual fire during the malfunctioning alarm? It was an absolute safety hazard! We bitched but the just flat out refused to refund us. We emailed the company and it was owned by some Chinese holding company and we got no where. For some reason we couldn't get a chargeback on her credit card either. I also remembered, about a month ago, we tried to stay at a Days Inn - it was pretty cheap, only $40 a night, and it was about 1AM so we really only needed a place to crash for the night. the lobby was pretty nice, but it was a motel style rooms. As we are checking in, the receptionist is having some trouble with the computer system, but disregards it. So we get our room key, and I open our room and there were people already in the room, in bed, watching TV. I just exclaim "what the gently caress?" and the lady in the room just starts screaming and I quickly close the door and run back to the lobby! I explain the situation and the front desk lady says "oh poo poo, no I have to call those people and explain" - and she gives us another room key. So go over to the new room, and I knock about 50 times and then go inside. Welp, someone elses poo poo was all in the room - food, clothes, etc. So we just went back, got a refund, and went to a $130 holiday in express across the street which was actually super nice. I was thinking, what if I had just moved around the dudes stuff in room #2 and just gaslit the gently caress out of him? Just put his shoes on top of the TV, folded all his clothes, etc? That would have been loving hilarious.
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Mar 6, 2015 00:40
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That would be pretty amazing! On behalf of the idiots that take on hotel management positions because it's something we like and we're actually good at, if the people giving you rooms don't know that someone is already checked in there than you should have every right to dick around with the persons stuff. This will result in enough complaints that the owner will hire a management company to save their lovely business and they will clean out the staff that can't comprehend what to do when the computer is down. If the management doesn't teach the idiots at the front desk to operate in these situations, the management should be replaced as well.
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Mar 6, 2015 02:57
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My SO and I call this one 'the Vegas story'. Over time it has grown into something of a legend around these parts. Let me preface this by noting that all my SO's coworkers have informed him that we apparently did Vegas all wrong, mostly because only once did anyone in our party (consisting of me, my sister, and our respective partners) consume any alcohol at any point. My SO drank two mimosas at the buffet and was mocked mercilessly by the rest of our little group. No other intoxicant was consumed at any other time during the trip. That being said, I do not remember most of our stay there, as is appropriate for Vegas. I had desperately wanted to go with my siblings to Vegas for my 21st birthday. When it rolled around, however, they emailed my SO with the notion that they thought I would enjoy a quiet evening at home for my 21st. This would not do. We resolved to do Vegas for my 22nd, and we would do it right, by God! This was not to be. We checked into our hotel at 2 in the morning. My sister was in front of us in line to check in, and received a free upgrade! I was immediately behind her and had booked at the same time, and not only did not get an upgrade but also had to pay a $200 deposit. We were tired and did not argue, and proceeded to our room, which was in the armpit of the hotel and immediately across from the elevator to the in-hotel club which dinged all night. We slept through it though, unaware that the worst was yet to come. The next morning we ransacked the buffet, which was overpriced yet delicious (yay Vegas). I ate some fish that was a little on the funky side but didn't really think about it. My SO drank the aforementioned mimosas and was ridiculed. We then walked along the strip all the way to the Rio, clocking over 26,000 steps on the ol' pedometer. I began to not feel well, but chalked it up to fatigue from the walk. We planned to attend Penn and Teller at the Rio that night, and sat down to rest. My sister remarked on how pale I looked, but by then it was time for the show. As we walked into the Rio theater I started feeling very dizzy and cold, and the other members of my group all donated their jackets (it was January) which I piled on my lap as I shivered in the overly warm theater. Then as the audience settled down in their seats and the lights dimmed, I began to vomit. I was a fountain of fishy orange filth, a volcano erupting upon every single chair around me and the pile of jackets (the only ones anyone in my group had brought with them on the trip). Shocked, I looked around me at the faces of the rest of the crowd through my vomit-drenched hands. I apologized over and over as security escorted me out. Later I learned that my sister's partner happily sat and watched the show despite there being a lake of vomit next to him, which is true dedication. I spent the remainder of the night with the worst food poisoning I've ever had in my entire life. I don't remember much aside from my sister's worried face as she contemplated whether to call 911 or leave me to sleep it off. We did not call 911. The next morning I could barely crawl to the toilet to puke. This was when we learned from room service that it would be impossible to get our clothing cleaned while it was covered in vomit, as it would have to be considered biohazardous. My SO decided that he would attempt to launder them himself in the hotel room shower. Several hours into his scrubbing of our filthy clothing we learned that the hotel window was broken and would not open. The stench was unbelievable- notes of fish and bile overlaying the reek of sick. Later after I could walk I found that I could smell it from the end of the hallway. Smelling it had a tendency to make me gag, so I fled to my sister's upgraded room which had a view and was nearly five times the size of ours. The windows also opened. My SO tirelessly attempted to wash the clothing, but it was so bad we just stuffed it in a plastic bag and brought it home with us on the plane. We somehow got our $200 deposit back. To this day, my SO still cannot wear his favorite peacoat due to the fact that it still has a faint funk. We laundered our clothing multiple times to get the smell out, and the first time I wore my favorite jeans again they had to go into the biohazard bin at work due to a chemical spill (this is a different story for a different day). This was how we did Vegas all wrong. As for my SO who for hours attempted to clean vomit off a pile of clothing in a foul, stuffy room in the armpit of the hotel, I married that man.
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Mar 6, 2015 05:16
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Not much of one, but: Sydney, Australia. Old guy in room next to mine knocks on my door and tells me to close my window, as he can hear "Critters" from my TV in his room. So I closed the window. Apart from that, I've never had a problem with hotels.
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Mar 6, 2015 08:43
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I was flying out of Tulsa, OK about a year ago on an early morning flight so I drove down the night before, intending on getting a cheap room. Went to a motel about a mile from the airport and checked in. $65 a night, cash only. That should have tipped me off to something amiss. They handed me the remote to my television with my key, which I thought was a little odd. I went up to my room and started poking around, like I always do before taking any luggage in. There was one light in the main room that was a lamp that needed to be carbon-dated then put in a museum. The bed had 70s style floral print on the comforter and was bolted to the wall and floor. The sheets were almost white and the carpet was almost solid brown. See, all of this I could deal with for the 6-7 hours I would be there as most was just aesthetics. Then I walked into the bathroom. The pedestal sink only had cold water (there wasn't even a faucet on the right-hand side), the toilet was missing the cover for the tank, and had poo poo-stains or bacteria all over the inside of the bowl. The icing on the cake was the bathtub. There was some sort of reddish stain covering the entire bottom of tub. I'm not saying it was blood (it was probably rust), but it sure as gently caress looked like it and there was no way in hell I was going to stay in that room another minute. I went back to the desk, gave them back their huge rear end remote for their lovely tube TV, told them the room was lovely, and got my money back. Went across the street to a La Quinta which was really nice.
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Mar 6, 2015 09:06
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I swear every worst food poisoning story starts off "so I ate some fish, in the desert, and" When I was in the desert I ate sausage and fruit and was fine. Who would eat fish in a place it doesnt even rain.
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Mar 6, 2015 11:17
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Yeah I should have known better. But it was smoked salmon, it should have been fine! 
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Mar 6, 2015 16:06
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I worked in a godawful hotel for way longer than I should have (a few years). I stuck with it for so long because I worked the night audit, and the place was dying nearly the entire time I was there, so it was really easy work and I didn't have to deal with problems all that often. I just stayed at the front desk and hosed around on my laptop most of the time. I had surprisingly few weird people coming in at night. But my god, the place was so bad. Just a really old building with all the problems an old building has, and to make it worse, the owners were terrible people who didn't give a poo poo about making the place look and feel comfortable, and would regularly cuss out employees for even minor things. By the end of it I just hated so many people. The owners, for being horrible people that didn't give a poo poo about anything but getting money from people. The customers, for not using Tripadvisor in TYOOL 2014 and helping that piece of poo poo hotel live a little longer. Seriously, why the gently caress do people still not read reviews before choosing a hotel? Even if you're on the road, I can't imagine not taking just a little effort to stay at a decent place. It made me so angry that the place still managed to somehow stay in business. I seriously wanted it to die. Don't work in hotels unless you really, really like interacting with customers that will be staying there, and unless you can find a good hotel which is also run by good management. Hotels slowly crush your soul.
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Mar 6, 2015 16:18
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Arnold of Soissons posted:I swear every worst food poisoning story starts off "so I ate some fish, in the desert, and" nonnemaus posted:Yeah I should have known better. But it was smoked salmon, it should have been fine! MrSmokes posted:Don't work in hotels unless you really, really like interacting with customers I was told by a lady when I was very young to never eat fish in a land-locked area, especially if that place is really freaking hot. That always stuck with me! I totally agree with you MrSmokes, most people don't understand the amount of interactions with guests that take place after checking them in.
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Mar 7, 2015 06:54
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I took my mom to a Rays game in Tampa and planned to stay in a hotel. During the game being able to ignore outside weather was amazing (a massive thunderstorm blew through an we got to see the roof dance), but after we left and walked the 2 miles back, she found a problem. There were dead hard wood termites in the bed, so she had us go back to desk for another room. Now it was ~1 AM and I had been drinking heavily going into the game but we got into the new room and she ripped open the sheets to find a few more dead termites, which were unacceptable. This led to me driving (luckily stadium beers were too expensive) 4 hours back home because a minor problem occurred. It's Florida, there will always be opportunistic bugs, them being dead is a good sign.
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Mar 7, 2015 07:40
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Got a couple lovely stories for yall. I also worked a little night audit. When I started the place had just been purchased by a larger chain. Background: It was the number 1 drug and prostitution motel in the county (cop told me this during a visit), was originally 4 buildings but one of the house cleaners was cooking drugs and burned the back building down and the fire department wouldn't go near it due to a large amount of ammunition inside. She still worked there for a while after I started but she was fired when money came up missing. During the renovation they found tons of needles hidden in the walls. I was told when I started that I needed to not rent rooms out to the same element that used to come there. Anyways One night this guy comes in and tries to engage me in a little small talk. He asked me if I ever got lonely there at night, but I told him I had a tv so I was good. He says if I got bored he wasnt going to sleep right away so I could just come by. He leaves the lobby and I go to the breakfast area where the tv was. I notice him watching me through the window so I walk to the back entrance and lock the bolt so keycards couldnt open it. A minute later hes back there trying to open the door with his card. I plant my foot behind the door so it cant be opened all the way and open it a crack to ask if he needed something, and apparently he wanted to take a tour of the breakfast room. I told him to come back during breakfast hours and closed/re-locked the door. I spotted him a couple times just 'casually walking by' the window. Later on when I was doing the audit I checked his credit card info: he was a teacher and his credit card was attached to the teachers union. I saw a guy and his girl getting out of the car on the cameras and they start arguing. The guy gives her a haymaker and they start rolling on the ground fighting. I grab a small bat from behind the counter and run out there to break it up. They both jump up and run off. In the morning I'm looking around where they were fighting and find his gun holster. I decided after that next time I'll just call the cops. Lady called asking for fresh sheets, she found blood on the ones on the bed. I acted shocked (I wasnt) and went to find some clean ones to give her (it was hard to find decent ones). Lady solicits me for sex, I decline. Another lady asks me to bring her extra pillows. Solicits me for sex, I decline. Two very attractive girls who were in town to take some sort of esthetician license test and try to get me to stay after work (I worked a day shift to cover a co-worker) to drink with them and 'hang out'. I stop by after my shift to drop off some ice they asked for and decline their invitation again and leave... dungeons and dragons book in hand.
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Mar 7, 2015 08:55
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Blackchamber posted:Two very attractive girls who were in town to take some sort of esthetician license test and try to get me to stay after work (I worked a day shift to cover a co-worker) to drink with them and 'hang out'. I stop by after my shift to drop off some ice they asked for and decline their invitation again and leave... dungeons and dragons book in hand. Hello past me. I remember a man who was clearly either extremely tired, on drugs or both. He came during breakfast and asked for a room. I gave him one. One of the housekeepers looked at me strange and said, "That man has a gigantic rip in the back of his pants. Half of his rear end is hanging out." Sure enough it was. He and his girlfriend thanked me later for letting them in, which knowing what I did earlier, I wouldn't have. Cops came looking for them later. One man slammed his pistol in front of me and said, "I nearly shot your housekeepers when they barged into my room." An illegal Indian couple for our shady as gently caress business owner had thirty rooms to clean a day, and instead of taking a break for lunch in the middle of the day, they would lie to customers and tell them that checkout was two or three hours earlier than it was and just break into the room. Thankfully the couple that replaced them, while still illegal and barely any English between the two, were super nice and worked with me rather than cause problems. I treated them nicely and would help them out with random stuff. They would feed me tasty Indian food. Racist and ignorant house keepers that complained about the housekeepers for taking their jobs. What made me sad for humanity was that at one point there were three generations of women from the same family working at this motel. Grandmother, mother and then the daughter. Only the grandmother had anything approaching a stable marriage, but her husband died. The mother had been giving four mild strokes by the previous management being lovely, and slurred all of her words. Loudly. The owner stole from everyone. Wage theft was rampant. He didn't own the motel outright, but instead was a sort of family co-op. The company he bought his supplies from was "selling" him stuff he never received, so he also stole from his family and defrauded the government too. Before I quit I ate asparagus for a week and peed in his radiator. I also turned him for tax evasion after I got his records because I was an ad-hoc tech guy for when poo poo failed. Nothing ever came of it. Being told to sell the rooms that were down for maintenance when things got full. Not all the time, but often enough to make it a problem. Not doing basic poo poo like spraying the adjacent rooms for bedbugs when one room had an infestation and paying three times as much when they spread. Had a manager that took me out for steaks, got blackout drunk and put a knife to my throat while going down the interstate. Ten seconds later he had a seizure, I thought he died in the car because he stopped breathing, then woke up. Asked if I could see his knife. He gave it to me with a "No problem, man" and a smile. I threw it into a lake I lived next to later. Played D&D at 7:30 on the dot after each shift on Sunday for five years. It was really only that that made the weekend shift palatable with college Monday through Fridays and twelve hour shifts Saturday Sundays. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Mar 7, 2015 |
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Mar 7, 2015 11:20
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Holy Crap! I'm glad you guys made it out of those situations alive! We had a Czech guy stalking our bartender and the police wouldn't do anything about it, he literally told her "My name is Peter, my name means rock, my weapon is rock, I love you and If I can't have you than you end, by rock." He kept parking different cars in the parking lot and requesting room changes, eventually moved on to staying at other hotels (I blacklisted him) in town but would park at ours for hours. This finally ended with a group of locals running him out, but this was after a month of 120 dollar room nights and flowers sent to her daily.
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Mar 7, 2015 12:45
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A friend of mine has worked at numerous hotels. She has great stories. She used to be a house keeper at some really nice places (a resort place in New Paltz, NY, if you know your luxury resorts) and a place she's at now, unnamed for her headache-free employment. She was a housekeeper at the luxury place, and lived on the dorm style campus they had there. Her first week is around Halloween. They have a special event they call "Murder Mystery Weekend," which no one told the new girl about. She goes into a room to clean it, and finds blood and knives in the bathroom. She feels faint and has to take several minutes to compose herself before using the phone to contact the front desk. They burst out laughing when she explains what's going on in that prop room. They didn't mean to be mean to the new girl, hey, just forgot to tell her. She met Stephen King and his wife, who had separate rooms. He stayed on the 6th floor, and she on another. He tipped housekeeping generously, and signed her an autograph on hotel stationary. She chatted with a NY Times crossword puzzle maker who enjoy chatting with my buddy, and ended up using a word in one of the puzzles. The resort had a ton of Eastern European kids come in for the summer, make decent money, and return to Ukraine and Poland to live comfortably the rest of the year off of. The $500 a night rooms were not selling out as much anymore, so the management started skimping on things, like toilet paper and gloves for cleaning. The housekeepers had to turn to stealing one another's supply carts in order to do a room. Finally, they would just flat out not have enough supplies to do the rooms. Some people are truly "dirty birds." She found tons of adult toys left over in the rooms, and once, a Hasidic Jewish man came out of his room screaming "What is this?!" over and over again because he had found the dumping box of dildos in his room. The hotel prided itself on being classic and sleek, and as a rule, did not offer televisions. If you wanted a TV, instead of going on some of the many trails or hiking or inside games or boating, you got charged for it. The place was amazing for weddings. I looked at it for our own wedding, but it was bare bones at at least $25,000. There were people who had more money than sense and would have monster truck limos and wedding cakes covered in gold leaf. It's an amazing view and scenery, however, and almost worth it. Almost. The gate/guardhouse was blown up by someone trying to cover his faulty accounting. It didn't work out the way he wanted. She's now a front reception person at a less reputable motel chain. The rooms are famous for being thematically individual. There are also just plain motel rooms. The room tracking system is screwed up. She is finishing her hospitality degree, and this company goes against all the best practices she's been taught about. She was almost raped by a room renter. She fled to the bathroom, locked the door, and got out of the bathroom window. Local police said that since he didn't actually do it, there was nothing they could do about it. A lot of drug use. Certain people are banned because of excessive drug use in the room or complete room destruction. The owners are actually very nice; they would front bus fare for her husband, their handyman,. to get to and from the motel when they were down to one car and working opposite shifts. I can mine her brain and see if she has anything else she can tell me.
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Mar 8, 2015 01:33
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We went to a friend's wedding at a pretty swanky golf course last summer and stayed at the hotel on site. The walls were paper-thin so we got to hear the couple next to us drunkenly arguing each night. Apparently accidentally pressing the wrong button on the elevator constitutes cheating because another girl is staying on that floor that he talked to earlier and he clearly wants to gently caress her! Who knew! Another time I booked a hotel room for an out of town job interview and ended up sharing a floor with an entire college frat who were the rudest loudest assholes ever. I complained to the front desk and they upgraded me to a nicer room on a different floor and warned me that the frat was getting forcibly evicted by the police later that night so I should probably stay in my room because it might get ugly.
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Mar 8, 2015 03:34
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I was in the middle of the amazon rainforest in a hotel that had an awesome breakfast but tiny rooms and the hallways were max 2 feet wide. I couldn't sleep because the couple across the hall were having horribly loud sex to some kind of mariachi music all night. Another time I was in a beach city on the Black Sea. My roommate snored so loudly it sounded like a jackhammer. So I dragged my mattress out to the balcony, but that didn't help because like a mile away there was a DISCOTEK that I could hear all night with some crazy DJ yelling super emphatically, in a crazy language, something that I can only describe kinda phonetically: blaBLAovich blarhOVIK!!! BACK STREET BOYS BLArg SPICKHKI!!! WANT THAT WAY ABLARHIV blTAHNSI koncertki BLAGOVNI!!! I was really, really angry that I couldn't get any sleep, but at the same time I was laughing all night because that guy's voice was so loving crazy.
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Mar 8, 2015 06:36
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Ahhh... Gwalior, India. I arrived at the train station and was very tried and it was reeeeally hot and decided for once in my life to forego a recommended hotel and just take what was closest. The guy at the front desk was weird and wanted money in advance so I asked to see the room and even it looked like a craphole the air conditioning worked so I said yes and paid for two nights. Well, the 1950's TV and air conditioning didn't work at the same time and I blew a fuse trying to get the TV on and the air conditioning stopped working so I had to change rooms. The other room was even shittier, didn't have any AC but had some weird kind of wind tunnel fan that was extremely loud. The switch was next to a big puddle of water. I went to their restaurant and their were no women (always a bad sign in India) and after the food was ordered I noticed cockroaches crawling around on the floor. I went back to the room and was a bit worried I'd die from some kind of electric shock considering how badly everything was wired but I was just too tired to change hotels. I got up the next morning and checked out early and couldn't have been happier.
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Mar 8, 2015 08:25
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I used to work the night shift at a Holiday Inn Express. To its credit, the place was clean and the housekeeping staff was militant. However, they never taught us desk people how the emergency alarm systems worked. One morning, at 5:30 AM, the breakfast bar girl burned the imitation eggs and set off the fire alarm. We were the only two staff in the hotel, and she sure as poo poo didn't know what to do. I called the fire department, and they were just like "If there's no fire, we ain't coming. You'll have to figure out that alarm by yourself." That thing was loving LOUD, and people were gathering in the lobby looking like grumpycat, sometimes holding children who buried their faces in their parents trying to escape the noise. Finally, after more than 30 minutes of panicked searching and no response to repeated calls to the manager's house, I figured out that the alarm's kill-switch was maybe inside this one wall-mounted black box in a room in the back. Of course, it was locked, so I spent a good 10 minutes searching for the key. At last, after 40 minutes, I managed to turn the eardrum-rupturing alarm off. A few cheered, but most people just grumbled and went back to bed. I'm still amazed that nobody said anything harsh to me, but they probably saved it for check out. Anyway, my nerves were shot, and I went home and passed out. I think anyone who complained got a $25 coupon, FWIW.
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Mar 8, 2015 09:56
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This seemed like the right place to bring these gems back from the dead. Not mine.quote:Years ago, I was the nighttime front desk clerk at a hotel (and as anyone who has ever spent enough time in the "hospitality industry" can tell you, hotels are breeding grounds of ). It was a pretty sweet gig. . .pretty much involved sitting in a comfy chair, smoking, and watching bad movies on cable for hours on end. The few customers I'd get were generally hookers and their tricks ("What do you mean, I have to pay for a full night? I only need the room for two hours, tops!"), rednecks too drunk to drive home from the bar down the block, what have you. A man can do worse than getting paid to watch poo poo TV and get fat. quote:A woman rented a room in my last few months at the hotel. She paid three weeks in advance, requesting a room in a relatively empty and out of the way corner of the first floor.
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Mar 8, 2015 14:32
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Tales of ShampooHorn. That was a good thread.
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Mar 8, 2015 20:32
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I spent three or four days in a lovely place in Toronto while I was apartment hunting alone in a semi-foreign country. Bed bugs the last night were what sent me packing, but the defining moment had to be the second night, when I got distracted from getting dumped on a Skype call by the sound of dripping water. I look over and the ceiling is letting down big droplets on the right half of the bed, and the ceiling is discolored from what it became clear to me then was a long pattern of this sort of thing. The water, I noticed, did not even sink into the sheets, because (I realized) they were plastic sheets. Didn't even bother with the front desk. I was a timid kid, they didn't speak a lot of English, and honestly I figured they liked it that way.
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Mar 8, 2015 21:39
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Jeza posted:This seemed like the right place to bring these gems back from the dead. Not mine. I'm so glad you posted these. I completely forgot about them.
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Mar 9, 2015 00:23
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Reminds me of my poo poo tale. I worked in a cheap hotel that did monthly rentals, and because it was cheap, we never did any housekeeping on the people who stayed monthly. So there was a guy who checked out after 3 months. He was quiet, kept to himself, I only talked to him once when I covered a night audit shift and he came back at 3 am stumbling drunk on a Tuesday. When he checked out, the housekeepers went into his room. Then called the front desk manager. poo poo, puke, piss covered the entire bathroom, piled up highest near the toilet. As far as I could tell, he puked one night, missed the toilet, and instead of cleaning, started to puke and poo poo further and further away from the toilet, every day, for three months. I think he checked out because it reached the bathroom door. Anyways, the real uncomfortable part was that my German co worker went in to snap pictures, on his on phone, for personal use. And wanted me to look at them with him and laugh, or enjoy or something.
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Mar 10, 2015 02:06
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I was staying in a hotel in Arizona for a week and my skin started to get really dry and itchy around my shoulders and shoulder blades. Despite ample use of several different moisturizers, it didn't get better and I was scratching in my sleep. I kept leaving patches of blood on the sheets and I felt pretty bad about it. After reading some of these stories, I don't feel so bad anymore.
Pixelated Dragon fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 04:03
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Pixelated Dragon posted:I was staying in a hotel in Arizona for a week and my skin started to get really dry and itchy around my shoulders and shoulder blades. Despite ample use of several different moisturizers, it didn't get better and I was scratching in my sleep. I kept leaving patches of blood on the sheets and I felt pretty bad about it. After reading some of these stories, I don't feel so bad anymore. Next time do gentle exfoliating with a loofa and a gentle body wash you gross weirdo
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Mar 10, 2015 10:41
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Pixelated Dragon posted:After reading some of these stories, I don't feel so bad anymore. No kidding. Worst thing I ever had to deal with was a shower from Hell. Not only was the water pressure something approaching what you'd expect from a fire hose, the hot water system was screwed up so that the temperature was either ice cold or scalding hot if you didn't set the hot and cold faucets to one particular setting which could only be obtained with the patience and steadiness of a bomb squad dealing with a live nuclear weapon. It seems like a say at the Waldorf-Astoria compared to most of the other stories.
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Mar 10, 2015 10:57
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Arnold of Soissons posted:Next time do gentle exfoliating with a loofa and a gentle body wash you gross weirdo That didn't help much either. IDK, it cleared up after I returned to the deciduous climate I'm accustomed to.
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Mar 10, 2015 13:59
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Jeza posted:This seemed like the right place to bring these gems back from the dead. Not mine. Wow! Before I was in management I spent a couple years doing maintenance on a property and housekeeping with my sister. One winter (apparently a lonely one for this poor bastard) we saw that he had finally checked out after 2 weeks of privacy signs on the door. Under the bed was a homemade dildo carved from splintered, rotting hemlock covered in blood. After arguing with my sister about who was gonna remove this nightmare along with the scumbags crusted to the carpet near it we decided that this was to be taken into the managers hands. After about 45 minutes of that sorry old drunk walking in circles wondering how the hell we are gonna do this he says "Alex, how would you like to learn how to lay carpet?" I quit. Thank you for sharing those! Horatius Bonar posted:poo poo, puke, piss covered the entire bathroom, piled up highest near the toilet. As far as I could tell, he puked one night, missed the toilet, and instead of cleaning, started to puke and poo poo further and further away from the toilet, every day, for three months. I think he checked out because it reached the bathroom door. One of the girls that worked at another property (that no longer exists, thank god) walked into what seemed to be a fairly clean room. She got into the bathroom and found this stack of 15 to 20 pizza boxes in the bathtub. This bastard had been making GBS threads multiple times over the course of his stay into a pizza box until it was full, he would then put that box into the bathtub and proceed to order another deep dish. Pixelated Dragon posted:I was staying in a hotel in Arizona for a week and my skin started to get really dry and itchy around my shoulders and shoulder blades. Despite ample use of several different moisturizers, it didn't get better and I was scratching in my sleep. I kept leaving patches of blood on the sheets and I felt pretty bad about it. After reading some of these stories, I don't feel so bad anymore. A person whose skin can't seem to adjust to the climate is forgivable as long as they're not an rear end in a top hat. GorillaMan! fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Mar 11, 2015 |
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Mar 11, 2015 22:55
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Husband and I checked into the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas for a weekend. The room seemed fine at first glance but smelled a little... off. Huh. Oh well, no big deal, let's grab a shower before heading out for dinne- The shower drain is clogged. With poo poo. It took them over an hour and a half to send someone up to clean the drat bathroom and I think their apology was to knock the $25 resort fee off our bill. 
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Mar 12, 2015 01:04
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Sock Weasel posted:Husband and I checked into the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas for a weekend. The room seemed fine at first glance but smelled a little... off. Huh. Oh well, no big deal, let's grab a shower before heading out for dinne- The most fun thing to do, if you ever plan to go back there, is send the hotel an email with this story and something to the effect of, "I just wanted to make sure this reached the attention of the right people, but boy, it sure would be a shame if someone posted this review on TripAdvisor." Same applies for anyone who had a lovely hotel stay. 
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Mar 12, 2015 03:23
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An ex-girlfriend and I had planned an interstate trip, but told me a few days before we left that she had cheated on me and once we got back our relationship was over. We still went on the trip. e: I mean it INVOLVES a hotel, but I guess it is more of a breakup story.. ee: Oh my CURRENT girlfriend and I got a room on our first date, but instead of setting the mood and stuff I though 'HEY THEY USUALLY HAVE FREE CABLE TV IN THESE PLACES' and I turned on some Joan Rivers thing and was thoroughly enjoying that while she sat on her phone next to me feeling kind of perplexed. TheMostFrench fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Mar 15, 2015 |
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Mar 15, 2015 09:25
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Reading through these stories make me feel like I have it super easy. I've been doing weekend night audit for roughly a year in a small, northern Arizona town......in downtown. The town doesn't seem so small at 140am on the weekends. Besides the constant barrage of drunken biker assholes disregarding everything I say and calling me a hipster human being, I've got a few standout stories: - On my first day of work, valentines day 2014, a guy comes in at 9am and the conversation goes like this: guy: hey man you got a room for tonight? me: sorry sir but we are completely booked tonight and throughout the weekend guy: *leans closer with whiskey breath* come on man I'm just looking for a place to kill myself tonight I promptly just turn around and stare at the wall like it's a giant boulder about to crush me while my front desk relief saves the day and talks him out of the hotel. Then she talks massive poo poo about him to an upper manager. Go Arizona. - 4am. Co-auditor and I knock on a biker's room to ask him to be quiet as him and his girl are yelling (it's an inside hotel), he opens the door, cocks a pistol and points it at my co-auditor's face while saying "leave me the gently caress alone if you loving call the cops I'm going to go downstairs and loving shoot both of you in the head". We try to wave down the police but the sneaky gently caress climbs down the fire escape and keeps us both occupied for 4 hours until we were both relieved. Of course they're scheduled for another night and the owner DOES NOT remove them for the second night. Insane. - 5pm. Not my story, but my day shift co-workers were working July 4th and a lady walks in the hotel needing to use the restroom. A co-worker recognizes her as a guest but notifies her the restroom was fully occupied. So what does she do? Moves to a corner of the lobby, squats down, fully visible to all front desk staff, as well as the street outside the hotel, on a holiday in which we had a large amount of child guests, and pisses. Everyone just stares at her. Then her husband approaches the desk from the lobby stairs, not in view of his wife, and asks the staff where she is. He is notified and responds with a sigh. edit: she was ~40, and very drunk. - 3am. A guy drunkenly passes out in the shower on the third floor. I'm walking on the second floor and notice the wallpaper in the hallway collecting water and spilling it everywhere. I go to the room, knock, and a guest answers: guy: sup me: hey can you check your bathroom My ankles promptly become drenched with water when he opens the bathroom door. guy: woahhhh, where did that come from? They got charged 2100 dollars in damages. Turns out before this, that same night, they threw a wastebasket full of vomit down a hallway for....some reason? - And just tonight, right before I wrote this, there was some crazy girl yelling in the hallway, ranting about how she was part of this wedding party that stayed tonight and that her phone was stuck in some slut's room she got kicked out of and she was a guest here and blah blah blah blah. Turns out she was just a girl from a bar that some of the wedding guests brought back to their room which turned out to be a little too much for them to handle. No dildo stories. Yet. Tophereth fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Mar 15, 2015 |
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Mar 15, 2015 13:10
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I'm wondering if there is enough interest to get an Ask me about working in a Hotel thread going? Seems we have several Hotel industry folks here to answer questions and tell stories. As for me, I'm an assistant GM and have been in the industry for 6 years. Our Hotel is five-time platinum awarded, has been in the top 10 of it's brand for over a year (out of 1100+ properties) and is currently in the running for Hotel of the Year in the brand amongst two others. Ironically my stories are still pretty similar to what you'd expect of a budget motel or dive inn. I'll try to dredge up a few here. Also, if anyone has any questions: like how to avoid getting the poo poo-Trap room or Killer Room as a guest, how to piss off hotel employees/management the most, how to get the cheapest rate possible, and how to avoid being treated like a second class guest - feel free to ask. It could have been worse... There are three types of guests that the hotel staff really despises for one reason or another. They are Wedding groups, Sports teams, and Tourist groups. Sports teams make a mess of the rooms and destroy the breakfast, and tourist groups are just a general nuisance with questions, pestering, and hoarding luggage carts. But for me - I hate wedding groups the most. You see, our hotel has a bar and a restaurant in it - one of the few hotels in our brand that still do. The food isn't that great, but the bar is fairly nice and pretty popular in the town, especially on the weekends. Now our hotel has around 100 rooms and a large banquet facility on our first floor. It's pretty common for a wedding block of 20-30 rooms to book with us, have the reception here, and then hit the bar afterwards. This particular night we had two wedding groups and about 60 rooms booked under the two blocks. Now this doesn't sound too terrible, how bad could 60 people really be? The issue is, wedding groups normally cram as many people into a room as possible. It's not just Uncle Joe, Aunt Diane and Cousin Billy in there. They'll have 4-6 people in each room, while trying to tell us at check in it's only two. The conversation when they ask for 8 extra towels for a two night stay is normally hilarious. This is always a mess - and why I hated weekends when I worked as a Night Auditor. All night I'd have to babysit people who should have been cut off hours ago and deal with noise complaints, fights, and puke everywhere. So this night in particular the bar is absolutely insane. I already broke up a "play wrestling match" on the second floor where one guy was seconds away from tossing another over the balcony, and helped two very drunk middle aged women to their rooms when they couldn't walk anymore. And this was just by 12AM. Naturally, over time the wedding groups mingled and people started interacting with other groups. I had one incident where a kid from one group snuck up on a groomsman in another and hugged him from behind, and started talking to him. The groomsman turned around and slugged the kid full force in the face, knocking him out cold. This almost started a fight between the two groups, but when the kid came too he was in a good mood about it, bought a drink for the guy that hit him and said "good talk, good talk". 1:30 and the bar is starting to wind down. One of the groups has mostly retired to bed for the night, and the other bought some six packs and went outside to relax in a sitting area we have set up. I was getting relieved that overall, nothing major had occurred. Yet. It was around 1:45 when the two kids came to the desk - guy and a girl. The girl was quiet, and clinging to the guy like she was so drunk she'd fall over without support. The boy looked at me and said simply: "I think you have a dead guy in your elevator. Also, he pissed himself." "What?" "Yeah, he's some old guy with that other group. Dude had way too much to drink and was hitting on some of our friends. He tried to impress them jumping over a rail and slipped and hit his head. We tried helping him to his room and put him in his elevator but he's still in there. He isn't talking or anything and his head is bleeding and yeah. There's piss everywhere too, I think it's from him." gently caress my life. "Alright, don't worry about it, I'll take care of it - it's under control." *All of the employees are trained to make it appear as if every situation is firmly in our control, even if we are seriously out of our loving league. The entire building could be burning down and I literally piss myself in fear and yet im still expected to assure everyone that we have the situation covered and there is no need to be alarmed.* In the elevator I find a sad, sorry sack of humanity. The guy (I'll just call him Bob) was not dead. He wasn't even passed out. He was just low. At a low point in his life. He was slumped on the floor, a gash on his head had been bleeding a bit but wasn't too much to be alarmed over. He had, in fact, pissed himself, and was sitting on the floor mat that was now saturated in his disgrace. He was awake, just zoned out and staring at the corner. My first worries were that he might of had a concussion or something. He blew off his fall and said that he just tripped and it wasn't major - he kept assuring me he was fine. Bob was drunk, but not past the point of realizing how stupid he looked. A crowd was starting to form around the open elevator as I talked to him so I stepped into that piss-mire and took it up a floor - stopping it so he had some privacy. I then spent the next 30 minutes with bob. I could not tell you his age. I could not tell you his favorite food or favorite color. But I could tell you he had a rough life. Two wives that both cheated on him. A son that refuses to speak to him. A dead mother and a father that beat him as a boy. Major insecurities about his hair (which is why he kept it shaved, I found out). And a massive, crippling loneliness. He admitted that he was hitting on some much younger girls and he didn't know why, but he thought jumping over a handrail was impressive - which is why he attempted it. He said this was a low point of his life and tonight was just absolute poo poo. He was here for a friend's wedding and made a dumbass of himself. During this time I gradually inched him up on his feet and down the hall to his room in the hopes of getting him in bed. I told Bob it could have been worse. I told him the stories of the old drunk racist black woman, who stripped down and ran through the halls. I told him of the guy that got locked out of his room when he decided to go get ice...naked. I told him of the person that bought the Jacuzzi suite and was so high he fell asleep on the sidewalk outside all night. It cheered him up and kept him going - inch by inch. I don't know how, but eventually the topic turned to me. Bob was sobering up and I think this was the most real human contact he had in awhile. It's normally taboo to talk about yourself to guests and I avoid it even to my coworkers - but I made an exception this time. I talked about how long I worked here. My thoughts on the job, the owners, the employees, my wife, my family. He was especially interested in hearing about my first failed marriage and my struggles getting over that. It's odd, I have never done that since then - years ago but it was a bit cathartic to let it all out. Towards the end, I had him in his doorway, almost there. I had just finished the part where my first wife finally signed the divorce papers. Bob turned on the light to his room and looked at me. Bob, piss covered, tipsy, and bloody - smiled. "It could have been worse, Steve. You could have bashed your head in front of a cute girl, and pissed yourself in a hotel elevator." I have a ton of stories. Some funny. Some introspective. Some disgusting and some downright depressing. Let me know if you folks want to hear some more. Dirtback Dan and the Funk Zone The Room on the Roof Terminal Departures That Jerk Steve fucked around with this message at 09:49 on Mar 16, 2015 |
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Mar 16, 2015 09:31
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Found a used crack pipe in a hotel room once, in some shithole off Times Square in NYC. I was 14.
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Mar 16, 2015 10:21
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| # ? May 3, 2024 05:38 |
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That Jerk Steve posted:I'm wondering if there is enough interest to get an Ask me about working in a Hotel thread going? Seems we have several Hotel industry folks here to answer questions and tell stories.  I would read all of these. Also, now I'm curious as to what hotel employees think of convention attendees--not for mundane poo poo like dentistry or ornithology, but comic and anime cons where costumed teenagers are shouting memes in the hallways.
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Mar 16, 2015 11:11
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