The tagline for Kevin Smith’s 1994 film Clerks was ‘just because they serve you doesn’t mean they like you.’
Hotel employees are trading stories of their worst guests, prompted by a front desk agent at a New York City Marriott.
Some of the things guest incidents are just off the charts crazy.
- Discharging firearms: one guest fired a gun in his Marriott room for target practice, shot through the mirror and into a vacant room. Justified it by saying “We are country boys, that’s what we do.”
An air marshal discharged his weapon practicing on the in-room TV. A bullet went through the television, the wall, and through another room’s TV. That room was occupied. Fortunately it was empty at the time! (Another guest melted an iron into the TV.)
Other gunfire damage was a ruptured water line from when a different guest fired into the ceiling – causing over $10,000 in damages.
- Fires and structural damage: A Middle Eastern prince set his room on fire at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, per a butler there. A different guest set someone’s car on fire thinking it belonged to his cheating wife—but he picked the wrong car. That car turned out to be stolen.
I’ve written about this antic before, but a guest hung a dress on a fire sprinkler, ripping it out, and shutting down the property for three days. Here’s a guest who caused $690000 in damage by hanging clothes on the sprinkler in his room. And a wedding planner ruined a wedding with a similar stunt.
- Elevator escape gone wild: A guest trapped in an elevator ripped out the emergency phone, climbed onto the elevator’s roof (with cars still running in the shaft), pried open doors on the second floor, injured himself, then hit on the female paramedic who responded to the scene.
- Toilets: One room was used as dog toilet for a week. In another incident, a guest wearing only a towel defecated in the hallway and tracked feces footprints across the carpet back to their room.
- Breakfast: Pouring maple syrup on the waffle iron at the buffet? Yikes. Someone else poured sausage gravy into breakfast station machinery.
I give hotel owners a lot of flack over misleading fees and cuts to housekeeping, delivering less while charging as much or more than they used to.
At the same time, I also recognize that operating a hotel can be a tough business!
Gary, the bullet point structure here is eerily reminiscent of LLM output. You wouldn’t happen to be reposting Reddit fed into ChatGPT, would you? As a thought leader in travel your expectation is to deliver actionable recommendations for travelers. This post strikes me as garbage bait for shallow engagement metrics and ad revenue.
@Un — Yet another horrible ‘take’ by you. Leave Gary alone!
Speaking of violating others sovereignty, the CCP’s erroneous ‘nine-dash line’ (also known as ‘eleven dash line’) violates international law, United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which limits a nation’s territorial waters to 12 nautical miles from its coastline and establish an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extending up to 200 nautical miles, within which a coastal state has sovereign rights over resource exploration and exploitation.
So, leave Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam alone, too!
Some grad student in Germany got locked in a chemistry lab after he and his girlfriend were….done. He set off the fire alarm and the system dumped $10,000 worth of suppressant on them. Oops.
Sadly, a lot of these ‘animals’ (my apologies to the world’s fauna) are the same morons sitting next to you on your flight…
@drrichard – Ah, give ’em a break … they were ‘innovating’ a new ‘love potion’ formula ! Chalk it up to
“research & development” !!
Sounds being an apartment owner.
Costco is removing coffee grinders because people will put cereal, dog food, or whatever in it. This riles me (why we can’t have nice things) despite the fact it makes my life better (I detest the smell of coffee being ground or brewed). Gosh, I really wish Karma existed.
@ Dave W –
Never ceases to amaze me how many creative A-holes there are in this country !
My same airline/hotel/restaurant germaphobic logic has applies to in-store appliances which have any public access. Same with the store bulk bins, although I definitely don’t trust staff hygienically either there. Too many filthy, rude, nasty, A-holes as evidenced by your comment.
But I gotta bite the bullet somewhere as I”m still ‘on the grid’ and hafta take my chances with the ever declining ‘service’ & work provide by staff !
Yes but did they get loyalty rewards points ?