Have you ever really thought about what goes on behind the scenes at a hotel? Not many of us have. This collection of stories from Reddit users gives us a little insight on some of the crazy situations both guests and employees find themselves involved in throughout hotels across the world. Some of these are hilarious and some you really won't believe!
(Content edited for clarity).
That’s One Solution…
“The janitor at the hostel I worked at was caught spying on (I think even videotaping) women in the communal shower. The women caught him and understandably exploded. As the front desk clerk, I had to quietly and politely process their refund as my boss tried to talk them down from their hysteria.
Another time, towards the end of my night shift, I smelled something awful coming from the dorm areas. A guest came out and told me that a Japanese woman in a long nightgown was walking around the halls dribbling diarrhea on the floor. I went to investigate and sure enough, there was the poo all over the floor, leading to a bathroom where the woman had locked herself in. I had no access to cleaning supplies so all I could think to do was throw towels over the diarrhea to try to cover the smell and apologize to the guests until the day crew arrived.”
Should Have Called The- Oh Wait…
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“I worked at a hotel chain for a while. We had a soccer event with a bunch of police who stayed for the weekend. They had a room rented just for their adult beverages which was emptied and refilled multiple times. Wasted cops were everywhere having a massive rager disturbing other guests, one of them peed in a potted plant that he was dancing with in the ballroom. They do this every year and had to stay with us because the other hotels in town had banned them for similar behavior previous years.”
An Unexpected Visitor
“A friend of mine was traveling in South Africa with a friend of his. They’re in the middle of nowhere in the cheapest hotel they can find. They end up drinking at the motel’s bar, where the bartender ends up showing them different scars on his body from ‘that one machete attack’ or ‘the time he got shot.’
They’re getting trashed and semi-scared, so they decide to call it a night and head back to their room.
They arrive at the bed they were sharing, and realize that, to their surprise, there is someone already sleeping in it.
Wasted and knowing how to prioritize, they decide to sleep along with the stranger already in their bed and ask questions later. Morning comes, they wake up, and basically tell the guy ‘Hey, we don’t care who you are, just get out and that’ll be the end of it.’ To which the guy answers ‘just 5 more minutes’ and proceeds to sleep for a solid 30 more. He eventually wakes up and leaves.
My friend later found out that he was actually a hotel employee who just drank too much and ended up looking for a room to sleep in, and just went into the first one that was open as my friend is an optimistic fool who doesn’t lock his door in a cheap motel thousand miles away from home with his passport and belongings inside.”
Just When You Think You’ve Gone And Done A Good Thing…
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“One night I was helping bartend/DJ while a Brazilian girl was clearly trying to hook up with an Aussie guy (both hostel guests.) Nothing was happening, so I played a romantic playlist. When it had finished playing, they had left together. Mission accomplished. I wondered why the guy had been so hesitant to make a move (the girl was cute) but was pretty happy that I helped make a hostel fling happen…
…until one month later. I’m on a bus in Bolivia and I look up to see the same Aussie guy. He looks at me very alarmed and quickly introduces me to his travel companion. Turns out it was his long-term girlfriend, who had just flown over to surprise him/join in on his travels. And that’s when I realized I had successfully tgot someone to cheat on their girlfriend.”
This Would Be Traumatic, To Say The Least
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“Back when I was working the front desk I had an experience I’ll never forget. To set the scene, I worked in a pretty nice branded hotel with a huge lobby and full bar. It was a swanky establishment. However, it was a downtown hotel and was directly across the street from an abandoned apartment complex that unofficially housed quite a few people who were doing quite a few illegal substances. Most of the windows were busted out, doors boarded up, pretty easy to picture.
I was working the 7-3 shift one morning after a sold out night. It was about 9 AM so the lobby and breakfast area (not separated in any way except for a disconnected wall) were packed with people eating and checking out. I’m dealing with a line of about 4-5 people when I hear a very loud slam on our front sliding door. My head jerks up and I see a sight I will more than likely never forget. A 50-year-old Caucasian man, completely nude (it was late November and NOT warm) was bleeding profusely from his mid to upper thigh. If all of this wasn’t enough, he had a compound fracture of the wrist, so his bone was poking out.
Because of the thud, everybody was now looking at this dude. I was essentially frozen, processing what had just walked through the door. The guy was just scanning the room, seemingly unaware of his injuries before he looked at me. I opened my mouth to speak and he just screamed and charged into the middle of the lobby and started jumping on the seating area in the middle of it. People are bailing out like someone had thrown a grenade in there. Blood is just flying everywhere and people are afraid to try and restrain this guy because of the blood. Finally, I regain my senses and call 911 and then my manager, who was actually coming down from the parking garage.
I tried my best to calm this dude down from a reasonable distance (like 15 feet, I wasn’t brave enough to get any closer to this guy). He was getting paler by the second because of the gash on his leg, and after 10 minutes the cops finally showed up and restrained this guy with not much struggle. He’d spent most of his energy jumping on the couches and chairs.
In the end, the hotel had to replace all of the furniture, re-carpet the middle of the lobby and hire 24/7 security at the door.”
This Is Something You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
“So, I’m getting into Budapest after taking a lovely 8-hour bus ride from Prague. I show up to the place at about 1:30 in the morning. The place I’m staying at is a party hostel mind you. I’m pretty beat, so I figure why not, I’ll grab a drink at the in Hostel Bar, head up to the room to watch a couple episodes of some TV shows and pass out for the night. About 10 minutes in, this guy from England comes in, and says, ‘Aye, I’ll give you 3,000 HUF if you leave the room right now. I’m tryin’ to hang out with a girl.’ Universal bro code pretty much says I gotta take on off, so I do and wish the guy luck.
I head downstairs, and the security is pretty much shuffling us all into the common room as it’s getting late, and they didn’t want us waking anyone up. So myself and a solid group of people head on in and I proceeded to witness one of the most bizarre things I had ever seen.
There’s a group of about 20 people or so in this room, and there are these two guys from the UK in the center. They’re all on all fours, kinda standing like a monkey would, facing each other. They tied two belts together, end to end, making one giant belt, and they had these belts in a figure-eight around the neck. There was a piece of tape right smack in the middle between both of them. It was essentially tug-of-war, but with your neck. The person who drags the other person across the line wins.
The kicker of this game? You are completely naked. So here I am, wandering into this common room late into the night in Budapest. I’ve been here all but 15 minutes, and my first bit of sightseeing are two tall, lanky, white guys from the UK playing tug of war with their neck. They called it Lizard Wrestling. When I asked, ‘Why do you guy’s call it Lizard Wrestling?’ Their immediate response was, ‘Do Lizards wear clothes?’ I mean, they weren’t wrong.
We decided to buy quite a few bottles and we’re all sharing. Eventually, they’re all killed off, and one of the Scottish guys comes up to me and says, ‘Aye mate, how would you like to be part of the first ever international lizard fight? Team USA vs Team Scotland.’ Everyone starts chanting ‘LIZARD FIGHT, LIZARD FIGHT.’ I’m pretty reluctant, but after a huge swig, I say ‘O.K.’ and strip down into my birthday suit. Needless to say, I’m 3-0 in my career.”
Strange Views On Money
“Last summer a lady from New York organized a party for her grandkid and reserved 80 rooms for the invited people for 3 nights. So when she came to check in, I told her ‘we usually ask for a credit card and take a hold for the whole stay + $100 for each night for each room.’ After a long calculation, it amounted to $650K and she hands me this thick platinum card, and to my great surprise, it passed.
When check-out time came, she made this big fuss and wanted the manager of the hotel, and threatened to one star us on trip advisor (we take it seriously). All because the water was overpriced in the mini bar. It was $11.”
Sounds Like A Pleasant Customer
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“So a man (60-70 ish) walked into my little motel office early this afternoon and asked if I had rooms available and the pricing. I give him the info and he seems satisfied. He asks if there will be rooms later because he plans to go to dinner with his wife then bother with checking in. I let him know that this should be fine as we’ve been slow today and the 20-odd rooms I have open likely won’t fill in that time. He asks finally about a military discount and I tell him that I, unfortunately, do not have anything like that available. He nods and leaves.
The same guy comes back a few hours later and asks for a room. I start setting everything up for him and go through everything. Seems normal. I then ask for his vehicle information form to be filled out and he does most of this but leaves off the license plate number (the most important thing for his parking permit). I ask him to fill this out and he just kind of laughs and says he doesn’t know it while pushing the paper my way. I say that I need it for the parking permit and he just nods and tells me I should go and get that then. I’m annoyed by this but whatever. This guy seems stubborn and I want him out of the office so I poke my head out the door, jot the info down, and slide back behind my desk.
While I have him filling out our digital prompt another guest comes in, a lovely Latina woman that is here with her husband and son. I tell her I’ll be with her in a minute because I see she has brought towels with her (we swap dirty for fresh ones in the office for those who don’t want room service.) She just smiles and nods and takes a seat in one of the lobby chairs to flip through a magazine while she waits.
I manage to finish checking the guy in and open up a property map to show him where his room is and so I can go over where basic amenities are located. A little bit into this I’m telling him the breakfast times and he kind of snaps that he won’t be here because he’s military and has to leave by six thirty. I don’t know what to say to this so I just nod and smile and am about to just skip to the next part when he huffily comments that we don’t support the military or care about them at all (I think this might have been because of our lack of a military discount?). At this, the Latina woman smiles a little and pipes up in her accent to thank him for his service.
He just rounds on this woman and says that he doesn’t need to hear that from someone like her and that she doesn’t really support them. I think she catches his meaning and she calmly mentions that she is a citizen and pays her taxes so… He’s having none of what she has to say and yells over her that she’s rude for interrupting the conversation that he is having and she should control herself better and blah blah blah blah.
He snatches up his check-in packet and keys and all and storms out of the office to his car.
The lady was alright and just tried to keep me from saying anything as she stayed perfectly calm while she was being verbally assaulted and I was standing there speechless. I changed out her towels and we got to have a nice talk afterward with me starting with ‘what a jerk’ the instant the door was shut and he was out of earshot.
Oh, and he didn’t leave until 11 AM the next morning.”
This Is What Nightmares Are Made Of
“One night we get a complaint of some bugs in one of the rooms, so we move them to a new room. We had a couple people from the cleaning crew out that night, so a friend in the cleaning crew asked if I’d help him move a couple things around to make sure he got all the bugs. I say sure, it’s a pretty slow night otherwise. I head up and find the room, and he tells me that he saw a few near the headboard and he wants to move the bed first.
As we move the headboard, hundreds of bed bugs come skittering out all over the walls.
This is the reason I only worked there one summer.”
Those Poor Girls…
“One hostel owner in Thailand told me the story of one of the worst guests she ever had. She said that there was an older Eastern European man in a 6-bed dorm, where the other guests were all younger girls. Apparently, after a night out, he came back to the hostel completely tanked. When he got back to the room, he stood in the middle, pulled his pants down, squatted down and took a MASSIVE dump. When he tried to stand back up, he lost his balance and fell right into it.
Then he tried to find the bathroom (which was in the room) and managed to smear his feces all over the walls in the process. When he couldn’t find it, he went to his backpack, unzipped it, and peed right into it (while dancing and singing). When he finished, he zipped the backpack up and then went to the balcony where he fell asleep standing up. The girls in the room were all woken up at that point and one of them started filming him, so there was video evidence of the whole thing. The best part is, the next day, he begged the owner to stay! As if the whole thing wasn’t totally humiliating.”
That’s Definitely Pretty Creepy
“I work the night shift at a hostel in Wellington, NZ at the moment.
The weirdest thing I’ve encountered is this crazy lady that likes to call around 4 AM and just breath heavily into the phone. She won’t respond, she won’t talk, but I heard the breathing. If I hang up, she calls back immediately. This happens about once a week.
I only say it’s a lady cause the person who did the night shift before me said that and I don’t know enough to refute it.”
Can’t Say I Blame The Housekeeper
“Guest dyed their hair bright red in their bathroom and didn’t clean up after themselves before they checked out. Housekeeper went in and started screaming hysterically because she thought she’d discovered a murder scene.”
At Least There’s A Happy Ending…
“I stayed in a Hostel in Glasgow in 2012. It was a 4 person all male room, and I was on the bottom bunk on the left. Three or four members of the staff turn the lights on and ask us politely to get our stuff and get out of the room. I notice that they’re looking at the top bunk across from me.
Wherein is a large naked man with wild eyes and a wilder beard. And there is poop… around. Especially all over the shower.
Staff moves us to another room, and presumably, remove the man. I never found out what his story was, if he had booked the room and was just wildly trashed or if he had just stumbled in there or what.
The worst part is that I forgot until the morning that the rain fly for my backpack was hanging up in the shower to dry… just hanging out with all that poop. The staff kindly retrieved it for me, and it didn’t seem too poopy, so off I went.”
Leaving Probably Wasn’t The Worst Idea…
“Staying at a hostel in Bangkok last year around this time. Roomed with a giant Austrailian that slept with a meat cleaver. He would pace around the room holding a switchblade and muttering to himself. I left quickly.”
That Doesn’t Sound Like A Very Good Prank
“I live in Kolkata, India and our holiday season is in October and the holidays end with a festival of fireworks. College just re-started and I was visiting a friend who had just returned from home when this went down so I got a front row seat to the calamity. Now, most students hadn’t returned to the hostel at this point, both from vacation and that day’s classes, so it was pretty much empty at that point except for a few people. Some juniors decided to prank the warden by lighting fireworks in his office.
They carried out the elaborate plan after college hours to avoid detection and all. The only problem was, the warden was still out on vacation leave and his office was quite a distance away from the main hostel building. So when a curtain or some cloth material caught fire, there was no one inside or around the office to call for help. The students were too afraid to call for help as they basically started the fire and wasted enough time before doing so resulting in a huge smoke cloud which brought our attention to it and finally, we called the firefighters and an ambulance for good measure and notified the authorities.
The most baffling part was when the authorities were looking for students to scream at for this disaster the group of juniors who started the fire were still present at the scene instead of running off. Needless to say, they were kicked out soon after.”
This Isn’t A Good Situation To Be In At ALL
“A massive snowstorm shut the entire city down for 2 days, none of the guests or workers were able to leave so we all stayed through the next few days. Someone spotted one of his roommates hiding kitchen knives under his mattress. Other guests reported this guy pacing around talking to himself. We tried to call the police as was policy but they couldn’t get to us because of the storm for a few hours, so some of the other staff and I had to handle the situation ourselves. Ended with the crazy dude on the first floor (where the lobby was) waving a knife around after we had everyone return to their rooms and lock the doors, while staff members blocked the stairs to keep the guy from going up to the dormitories. The police showed up about an hour later but it was pretty tense.”
Imagine How Much He Saved Though…
“I knew a guy who lived at a hostel. That’s right, he stayed at a hostel year round, every day of the week. Why? It was cheap and he hated apartment hunting. But that’s not all. This was in China and he also hated learning languages, so he spoke basically no Chinese. And he had no friends so he’d spend his evenings getting trashed. He was also mildly racist and a raging sovereign citizen type, despite this not being America and him having about as many civil rights as a farm animal. He loved to try and tell any Chinese who could speak English why the Chinese government was bad too.”