How To Improve Guest Services In A Hotel

The service industry is an interesting one to work in. It has a way of always keeping you on your toes, thanks to the constant flow of strangers you encounter throughout the day. And hotels are a shining example of this. The chances of interacting with someone strange or witnessing incredibly odd behavior increase tenfold when you have people from all around coming to stay with you for at least one night. Just take it from the following people, including hotel employees, who shared stories about some of the craziest and weirdest things they've ever witnessed guests do.

A Blinding Image

We had a guest on the 1st floor who left his blinds open and slept naked. The owner called him to ask him to close the blinds. He must've been super embarrassed.

I checked a guest into a room and they immediately came back down holding the microwave from the room. There was a partially microwaved sprinkler head inside. I upgraded them.

Hopping Around

Our guest requested room service to bring her some food. When the room door opened she was wearing a full body bunny pajama/costume, ears and all. She asked to wait for a little, went to the other side of the room, came hopping and took the plate with both hands together like a bunny "would do." She said thanks and hopped around to leave the plate in the room. Then she hopped back to close the door.

Hotel Vape-ancy

Not really strange but last night there was a sweet 16 in the party room. I work in the restaurant and literally every 10 minutes a group of 16 year old boys would come out for a vape break thinking they were the coolest. They had the whole bar yelling "EVERYONE GET OUT OF THE WAY THEY'RE BACK FOR A VAPE!!" I hope the boys' parents show up to drive them home later and see them out there.

Spoiled to the Core

We had a family from the United Arab Emirates who owned some sort of huge construction company, and they brought their entire family to stay at our hotel. I think at the peak of their three-week stay they had probably rented out our 12 largest suites. The youngest boy was an absolute nightmare, literally the epitome of a spoiled rotten child. I think he was about 8 and had to weigh at least 160 pounds. He threw his iPad (new in the box) into the swimming pool in the midst of a tantrum, and the next day he came back with the family with three bell carts of shopping bags and a new iPad. I've never seen people just spend money like that, not even the actors or championship athletes who came to our property.

Cold Corpse

I was working in reservations and a man called to reserve a room. After booking the room he asked if he could store his wife's corpse in our walk-in fridge overnight. He said he had all the appropriate legal docs to transport her over state lines and was trying to get her home to be buried.

A Vanishing Act

Disappearing.

My parents used to own a guest house (small, family-run hotel) and one guy came to stay. My mum checked him in and showed him to his room. He was never seen or heard from again. My mum was the last person to ever see him alive. She reported him missing to the police and as far as we know was never found.

We lived very near a coast path and police think he either fell or jumped off it somewhere.

Naked and Afraid

A guest mistook the hallway door in his room for the bathroom and locked himself out of the room naked. He panicked and tried to kick the door to his room in but ended up breaking the handle off. He came down to the desk wearing nothing but a garbage bag. Since the handle was broken and it was the middle of the night we couldn't get into his room until maintenance fixed the door the next day, so I had to move him into a different room, where he remained naked until morning.

Romaine Calm

As the owner of a bed and breakfast place for the last eight years, the craziest thing I ever found was an old battered notebook with "Why I love salad" written on the front and 80 pages written about why salad was amazing. There'd be the occasional suggestion that the author believed salad to be alive in some sense. It looked like it had been written on and off over the course of several years.

Food Safety

I had a guy who said his microwave didn't work. I went up to the room and he had locked a plate of food in the safe.

Extra Mayo

A mate of mine worked at a hotel in Sydney, Australia, as a temp cleaner. Not really disgusting or weird, but the residents had decided to cover the floor in the bathroom with mayonnaise and did the same with the mirrors.

The Goatysburg Address

A goat dressed like Abraham Lincoln.

There's no more story here, at least none that I know. Working as a cleaner in a hotel, went to clean a guest's room, dreading it since they'd been there for a bachelor party, found the goat. Don't know how it got there, or how it was removed, but it made a good story for a while.

Nailed It

I was working at a luxury hotel and we had a fairly big-name band staying with us. There were no noise complaints, and they seemed to be perfect tenants. When they left and we went to clean the room, every single piece of furniture was nailed to the ceiling in roughly the same configuration that it was in on the floor. I found it to be quite amusing. Management didn't.

Fishy Behavior

My family is in the hotel business. One day a particular room just started to stink terribly for no apparent reason. We checkedeverywhere multiple times looking for the source of the scent, but no dice. We sprayedeverything in the room numerous times with deodorizer to no avail. We left the room open daily for months to air it out without any change.

Finally, we somehow tracked the smell to the table lamp. We were dumbfounded, asking ourselves how it could be emanating from there. The previous tenant had broken the thing, put a fish in it, and glued it back together. My brother and I died laughing and actually applauded this guy's ingenuity. He got us good.

Blood Bath

I used to work for an adults-only all-inclusive resort. An older German couple were celebrating their 40th anniversary when they called for help, and I was the manager on duty. They were taking a bath together in the jacuzzi when one of her varicose veins popped and pumped blood EVERYWHERE in the room.

Unexpected Christmas Finding

A friend of mine worked at her parent's hotel. One of the guests alerted her to a bad smell on one of the floors. She went up and traced the smell to one room. When she opened the door, a man was sitting on the end of the bed facing her and looking at her. She asked him what was going on, but he didn't answer. Turns out he'd had a heart attack a few days prior while putting on his socks. It was Christmas Day when she found him.

Washed in Wine

One time I had to make a room service delivery — a full bottle of Bordeaux. I knocked on the door, and an elderly woman who identified herself as an artist opened the door. I opened the bottle for her and handed it to her, and she asked me if I wanted a "blessing."

Being in the service industry, I said sure and she asked me to take a step back. She took a big swig from her $45 bottle and spat it in my face.

Shower Smoothie

My fiancé was completing her daily workload when she came across a room that smelled like a tropical air freshener. Apparently, the person staying in the room attempted to make a smoothie in their bathtub. The kicker is that she couldn't remove the blueberry stains from the tub.

Loose Change Left Behind

We had a guest check out, then come back the next morning hollering about how he really needed to get back in his room. We had checked other people into his old room, so I told him that he wouldn't be able to access the room. He asked if housekeeping had found anything in there, and I looked in our database and said no, they hadn't. He said, "You need to call the people in the room and have them let me in because I have $10,000 in cash under the mattress in there and I forgot it yesterday." What the heck!? Why would you leave $10,000 cash in your hotel room? He started causing a scene and was super insistent we had to wake up the family in the room at 7:30 in the morning. He ended up retrieving it after security got involved.

Disassembled and Unhinged

One guy (who we later learned had schizophrenia) stayed it our $300-a-night hotel for about a month. Once he bounced some checks we went up to his room to lock him out, and we went in and looked around. All he had in the room was a large bowie knife in the bathroom, a cut-in-half melon that had been sitting there a while, a laptop that was completely disassembled and laid out on the floor (he had flipped the beds against the wall) and some intricate drawings of a ship in yellow crayon. There were no clothes as he wore the same thing every day (black jeans, a white button-up and a leather vest with a Playboy bunny sticker on the back). All the pictures had been taken down and the outlet covers and light covers had been removed.

He was pretty nice when we asked him to go, but when he came back a few months later he told us that he was the master of the whole corporation and we would be ruined. About a year later I found him wandering the hallways and when I asked him what he was doing, he said he was looking for a job application. We got him one and he left.

The Forgotten Friend

My buddy works in a hotel down on the Panama City strip. Told me last year the maids were doing cleanup after a group of college students on Spring Break checked out. So as to be expected there were beer bottles everywhere. The bathroom door was locked. Once they get it open, they found one of the students passed out on the floor. There had apparently been some big fight and she went and locked herself in the bathroom and in the morning everyone had forgotten about her and left. Luckily they weren't super far down the highway when she called them screaming at them for forgetting her.

Satan and Sinners

I'm the lifeguard for my hotel but housekeeping was short-staffed, so they asked for my help. They got me to clean the business suites and such on the top floor. Sure. Fine. Businesspeople are generally clean.

I was working in two rooms in when I came across a messier room. A man asked us to clean and organize his room while he was at a meeting. No problem. I got new towels and soaps. I took out all the dirty towels and blankets. I went on to the desk to pick up a used cloth, and underneath it was a stack of about 20 cards. On these cards was a red haze or smoke with Satan in the middle. It read "Have you worshipped Satan?"

To my understanding, this man was a Christian man who is trying to convert sinners, or in his words "satan worshipers," to Christianity. The cards were for anyone who wanted to get help, but at first glance, it was very strange.

Disorderly and Wasted

Worked at a small hotel for a short time. A couple spent two nights. The first night the man got wasted and accidentally entered the wrong room. It took about 15 minutes to convince him he was in the wrong room. The next day a mirror fell off the wall in their room and broke, but the boss figured it just wasn't secured well.

At checkout, the guy told me that the toilet had broken and he left the piece that broke on top of the toilet. So I went to check it out after he had left and the toilet was broken, and there was a piece on top of it. It didn't belong to that toilet though. We never found out what happened to the piece that broke off the toilet and we have no clue where the piece he left there came from.

Pocket Tampon

I work at the reception of a luxury hotel in Europe. One morning as my colleague is checking out a very happy looking couple, she asks how their stay was and they respond that everything was great except for one thing. The woman said that when she had put on the bathrobe, she noticed a tissue in the pocket. She pulled it out and realized that there was a USED TAMPON inside. The craziest part? it didn't faze her, and she said she would definitely come back.

Screwed in the Head

I have worked front desk for ages and oh, the stories I can tell. The one that sticks with me the most happened around Christmas. I'm sitting there at about 2AM when a guy comes running down with a screwdriver sticking out of his face. "Call 911 and hide," he manages before he passes out. I grab the phone and run into the room where the security tapes are, lock the door, and call. On camera I see a second man walk down, place a pillow under screwdriver guy's head and then sit on the lobby couch. He was the stabber. Cops come, arrest man #2, whisk man #1 off. He lived. I guess this whole thing happened because man #1 homewrecked man #2′ s relationship SEVEN years prior. Yeah, I took a leave after that.

Coffins and Cheating

I used to work at a hotel. The most bizarre thing we saw was in a room a man was staying in, in which he stayed for a few days. When one of the cleaning ladies went to clean it while he wasn't there we saw he had a coffin in the bed. Next day when we cleaned it we noticed the coffin was open and he had an axe and he had a freaking pet snake just loose in the room. The room was always neat except for the bed not being made and dirty towels. Creepy.

Faking It

Probably the strangest thing I've ever discovered actually was brought to light by a guest complaint. He had sold his laptop to another guest for $100, and when he went to spend the money, he discovered it was counterfeit. We called the police, who broke down the door to find a printing press and a large counterfeiting operation.

The Peeping Perv

I worked in a resort hotel in the Catskills. We would have a slow period in the winter so many employees would stay on and do room maintenance (painting, varnishing woodwork, etc.). We noted peepholes drilled in the hall doors. The holes would be drilled at an angle to best view the bed or the dresser mirror, which was always on the opposite wall of the bed. The owner of this hotel was a real creep.

Have a Lice Vacation

I had a woman meet me in the hall with her room's dirty sheets. No big deal, we were right by the laundry room and I could switch them for fresh. Except, of course, that as I turned to walk to the laundry room she informed me that the sheets I was now carrying were infested with lice. The family had come to stay at our hotel to de-lice themselves.

An Apple a Day

We once had a guest check in at the beginning of a month. She did not come down for breakfast in the mornings. She refused any and all service to her room for an entire month. No new sheets, no new towels, no general cleaning. But every day she would come down to the front desk and ask for 4 bars of regular soap and an apple. That's it.

We tried looking her up on Google to see if she was a missing person somewhere or wanted or something, but we came up with nothing. Finally, after about a month, her bank called us to try to figure out why she was staying here for so long, suspecting fraud. We verified the account with the ID and it all checked out, but she refused to talk to the bank herself, so the bank wouldn't let her transactions keep going through. We had to evict her from the room because her card would no longer be authorized for the room.

She left the room out of a side door with no belongings, in the same clothes we had seen her in day after day asking for those bars of soap. Inside her room, they found piles and piles of unopened soaps, just sitting there. Blood was splattered everywhere, in the bathroom, in the bedroom, all over the sheets and the duvet. And there were apple cores everywhere on the floor.

We never figured out what was happening, but that's the weirdest story I've had so far.