Hi there! Welcome to the Bored Panda luxury hotel. Here’s your room key and a list of amenities we have to offer. A complimentary breakfast will be provided in the restaurant each morning between 7 and 9, and there's a gym on the third floor that’s available for all guests. Feel free to call the front desk if you have any questions, and enjoy your stay!
You might associate staying in a hotel with rest and relaxation if you only book them while you’re on vacation. But spending time in a hotel is an extremely different experience for the staff. Employees of luxury hotels have recently been spilling secrets on Reddit about what really goes on behind the scenes, so we've gathered some of their most unsettling stories below. Enjoy reading through these details that management might want to keep under wraps, and be sure to upvote the tales that will make you rethink your next stay in a hotel!
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Front desk knows all the call girls. We give them water on the way out and sometimes call them taxis. Management doesn’t like us doing it but escorts tip well.
A friend of mine has worked in hotel management for years and he's always said the better the hotel, the better call girls are treated and regular guests don't even know they are there.
I only work as a housekeeper at a regular 4 star Hotel, but probably about 25% of people either bleed or leave s**t stains on the beds. It's truly atrocious how disgusting people are, especially when they know someone else is cleaning it up. Even the wealthier guests. And the best tippers are the cleanest people. If someone fully s**t on the bed and used towels to wipe, left cum on the shower door, drank heavily and puked on the carpet in multiple places, and clogged the toilet, that person will not tip at all. But the person who barely used the full bed and didn't use the shower at all and was super clean and polite, now that's a good tipper.
Imagining the super clean person who doesn't use the shower casually sitting on their hotel bed licking themselves clean like a cat.
My buddy was a dive instructor at a luxury resort on an island.
One of the guests had a heart attack on the diving excursion(before he got off the boat).
The nearest Doctor couldn’t come for 24hrs, so they put the corpse in a guest room and cranked up the aircon.
Of course reception gave the key to the corpse room to a newly arrived honeymooning couple. They were greeted by the star of weekend at Bernies
Edit for clarity: Dr was to sign off death, do formalities not to save life.
Mauritius in the early 1990s.
"Walter, when you said it was dead at this hotel this weekend I wasn't expecting you were being LITERAL. You had better have a backup room somewhere."
When I worked at a nice hotel, the 'affair [code of conduct]' was brought up in training. Never mention a person being a regular and don’t mention anything about their partner or the fact it’s a different partner. That became a rule after some valet basically kickstarted a very nasty divorce with a wealthy guest.
My brother worked in an upscale hotel in Southern California. A morbidly obese guest sat on the toilet in his room, shattered it, got his femoral artery slashed by a chunk of broken toilet, bled to death, and flooded his room when the water line ruptured. My brother found out about it from the maintenance guy who found the body. Management made sure no other guest ever knew, including the guests in the room below the death scene who called for maintenance because water was running down their wall.
I worked in room service at a very chic hotel in Miami. One guest requested that a specific waitresses (not a room service worker) always deliver him food. Not exactly sure what went on in there, but he tipped her with a big bag of weed each time. Which she would promptly bring back to share with the room service staff. Calvin Klein brought his own food because he was on a special diet. He was an a*****e about it too. I can confirm that the concierge will get you WHATEVER you want: women, d***s, Cuban cigars, guest listed at clubs...
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I worked at a nice but older resort--one step above a cheap motel. A local hooker stole all the furniture from one of our rooms. It was old crappy wicker furniture. We had a local couple, who were staying with us to avoid being served for a lawsuit. We weren't allowed to say that they were staying there. The police eventually showed up for them.
There were several times when guests would come to the front desk claiming the maids had stolen something from their room. They would be irate, demanding we call the police. Every. Single. Time. They found the item either in their luggage or car, or their travel companions had moved/packed the item.
One gentleman claimed that he forgot his very expensive camera in his room. My manager pulled up video that showed him packing up his car, placing the camera on top of the car and driving off without realizing it.
A family member used to work at Opryland Hotel in Nashville. Yes, it's super fancy. For about a year, they had a phantom pooper. As in, random dumps left in random places. It was always in corners where security cameras didn't reach. They figured it was an employee, and had some ideas, but never knew who it was, until someone left and it stopped. This was about 20 years ago.
Porn shoots. And you know those carpets and upholstery ain’t getting cleaned.
I used to work as a freelance bartender and hotels were always the worst run situation I would end up in. Here are some examples from a really nice looking hotel in an old monastery.
The beer lines had never been cleaned, like literally never. I asked where the equipment was to do it and no-one could tell me. I eventually found it dusty in a closet in the cellar.
The breakfast buffet leftovers were usually reheated and given to the staff, but sometimes became the following day's breakfast buffet.
The chefs were just s**t faced pretty much every day.
The worst I saw though was the wine put out on tables at a wedding. They married them up, recapped them, and put them back in the cellar. Not even the same wine getting poured into bottles. Guests had drank straight from them and everyone had seen, and no-one had an issue with this. In my country this is actually illegal, it's called diverting waste. This was the final straw for me in this particular venue. I told the manager that I didn't give a s**t what he did after my time there ended but there was no f*****g way I was letting that wine be resold. He tried to tell me that it was perfectly legal, I cut him off and told him that it wasn't, it doesn't matter either way, it's disgusting and immoral, and if I find a single bottle of that wine in the stores I'm walking out.
Luckily when you're freelance bartending somewhere you're there because they desperately need you, so threatening to leave works really well.
I worked in golf resorts for a while, dealt with elite 1% a**hats for many years. I’m not going to give anyone a playbook at stealing identities, but billionaires are notoriously careless with their bank information. In a hotel, there are times where you need a credit card authorization form, faxed. It’s a major security risk to send it through any other electronic way. But these one percenters see all that as an inconvenience. They will be like “listen, I don’t give a s**t, I don’t care about your policy, you’re going to take my info however *I* give it to you.” Remember when Mark Zuckerberg was burned for having a password “dadada”? This is exactly what some of these wealthy people do.
We had valet service at our hotel, and due to huge amounts of theft and breakins by bums in our lots we had to go thru guests cars and take everything of value out to hid stuff in our conference room, then put it all back in before we brought their car around.
Was ridiculous. *and* we had to keep it under wraps.
Why not just improve security in your parking lot instead of all that messing around?
Bed Bugs: Larger hotels have better insurance to compensate for bedbugs. We wont say their name but we will hand you over to human resources who files a claim and start a compensation package. As for when it happens it can cost us between 2500 and 5k to clear a room of them and we treat the rooms on each side of the infected.
I work in a Vegas casino and I’ve seen, on multiple occasions, luggage down at the trash dock. I mean luggage with airport tags still attached that look like they’re in use.
Could draw a couple conclusions. Are people buying new luggage here? Not likely. We sell it, but these are newer bags I’m seeing. The much more likely scenario is these people are either no longer here or no longer alive. Deaths happen here and you’ll never hear about them. Trafficking is the darker thought for me. Plenty of beautiful young women here being way too loose with their own safety.
—no one is blaming the women. But getting blackout drunk and wandering off into Naked City or down Flamingo rd at 2am is disregarding your own safety.
We have a secret way in from the parking garage that leads to the executive offices. It’s uh. For prostitutes.
I worked cooking at an ultra exclusive resort in Utah ($3k-$12k/night)
Nothing that exciting happened in my year there. I found a bottle in the tallboy (large fridge) labeled 'Kristen Belle's Breastmilk. DO NOT USE'
Most celebrities were nice, except for David Beckham. He specifically requested no staff members make eye contact with him
I had put in my 2 weeks, and was really drunk on a day off, and made a post on FB about how Gordon Ramsay was coming and I hoped he wasn't filming Kitchen Nightmares with us. I was fired within 24 hrs, lol. I did get to cook fish tacos for him and his family though, and I heard he complimented the dinner kitchen crew directly (partially open kitchen), which is cool.
I mean, I am all for giving celebs their privacy and stuff. But requesting no employees look him in the eye? That reeks off "You plebs are too beneath me to deserve looking at me directly." F*ck him.
My wife claims that the amount of people who s**t in the shower far exceeds however many people you think s**t in a shower
Edit: 1000 people have commented waffle stomp. You do not have to comment waffle stomp. Please stop giving me notifications.
"waffle stomp"?!? Do I really want to know, or do I keep what little innocence I have left intact...
My cousin worked in Vegas at a few major resorts from 2008 to 2015. He said that for most of them, the staff was the best people to ask where to get drugs from as they were the ones around the most. He said not to ask directly, but if you have a bellboy bring up something, ask them or ask room service. They usually can sell directly or know who's holding in the hotel.
A bellboy in Vegas helped me find the best tattoo parlor. We asked him because he had some cool tattoos. And no I wasn't drunk - I was planning to get the tattoo while I was there anyway. :)
I used to work at a high-end lodge that hosted holiday parties/fancy dinners for software giants, and one exec peed ALL OVER a room. It was $13,000 in damage. We regularly had rich guys pull up in their Lamborghinis with a sex-worker. My favorite was the couple we had to essentially evict from their room due to smell and noise complaints. When we got in, there were dozens of designer shoe boxes and coke residue everywhere. The woman left with her foot hanging out the window as they drove away — wealthy people are weird.
All people are weird, it's just wealthy people don't have to try and hide it because they rarely suffer consequences so why bother.
A well-known luxury hotel and resort chain keeps a database of you. They get pictures from the internet and basically 'stalk you' to create a profile. They put what you ordered to eat, how many towels you needed, what drink you liked, your kids' names and birthdays, addresses, and phone numbers. Everyone working in the hotel has access to this database and can see your information. It's not all good stuff, either. We know 'you were an a**hole to Jen' while you were staying in London. The one I was at had to remove cameras in the lobby because big wig guys would bring their mistresses and no evidence was allowed to be recorded.
Some luxury hotels that cater to sports teams have standing agreements that no room service is allowed after the team departs, otherwise, the girls the athletes brought back the night before will rack up huge bills the team has to pay (Edited for clarity)
One thing management definitely wouldn't want guests to know is how sometimes housekeeping cuts corners if they are running behind. If you're staying just one night and your sheets look and smell clean enough, they might not actually get washed. That's right, management sometimes instructs housekeeping to skip the wash if it seems unnecessary. So, that 'fresh' bedding you're snuggling into? It might have been slept in by the previous guest. Sweet dreams!
Source: Former luxury hotel employee bf.
I think we all need to strip the bed before we leave, for each-other's sake. Just pull it all off and pile it on the bed, then they may as well put out fresh bedding from the neatly folded stuff, rather than untangle what you pulled off.
There is this hotel near the Seatac airport. people will rent rooms on the back side top floors and then suicide off the balcony. Yeh they are not going to run that in the news. Not often, but when it happens no one knows.
My story's quite tame compared to most of the ones here. When I was in college in the early 1990s, I was a banquet server at a semi-high end place, and there was a couple who stayed in a room for several days and ordered room service for all their meals, including at least one bottle of Dom Perignon champagne, which at that time was $150 plus tip.
They were otherwise unremarkable except for one thing: When they checked out, they paid their bill entirely in quarters, which they brought to the lobby in canvas bags. We guessed they most likely owned a car wash, or a laundromat.
Reminds me of the last two lines of an old joke. "Who gave you a quarter?" "All of them did."
Human trafficking became so bad that the company gave us training on looking out for it. There is policy in place to knowingly cause you issue and pacify you (ex: routine elevator maintenance during a busy period because the tech travels around and it is now or 3 weeks from now. The elevator did not "have unforseen issues") Professionals are the worst guests for partying and puking everywhere and pissing in halls and breaking things and f*****g in public areas... lawyers, doctors, teachers. In that order. Whenever they had conventions, extra staff were on the next day for dealing with damage. EDIT: I forgot to add overbooking as an example of d**king with people. We assumed not everyone would show on a 100% occupancy night and booked more than we could hold. The rare time we did have everyone show, "heres free stuff and a ride to x hotel". We even had friendly agreements with neighbouring competition to let each other know when we could take each others overbookings.
I worked in fancy hotels for over a decade some corporate owned, private owned and indian owned. Just about anything you can imagine happens. I was in a group of managers of different properties who would meet weekly for drinks and we would share " well you wouldn't believe this s**t" stories. We had a saying, "don't ever say I have seen it all or what's the worst that can happen".
But to be specific, fires, death, robbery, prostitution, sex in every nook and cranny, drunk people doing stupid s**t, "important people" doing stupid s**t and thinking their clout can make it go away. However, the best ones are really the most un-wild and just mechanical failures. Things like fire systems going off , a boiler busting and water raining down an elevator all the way to the lobby. Scissor lifts falling through the floor because the dirt washed out under the foundation concreate.
If you really want to get a daily dose of what it's like front of house ppl have a sub called r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk/
Probably the most scarry thing is really just the turn over rate. The owners/ corporate overloards are always trying to save a buck anywhere they can. And it's a shark filed world. I have seen so many times were they would fire the managers of departments who were loyal and hard working just to save 2k a year promoting someone who barely knew what to do. We ask the employees to deal with the unexpected all the time and never reward them and it's just a game of how long will they put up with this s**t vs do they believe they can do better vs will someone do it for less pay without them realizing it.
Having worked in the casino industry, one of my fellow slot managers used to be a hotel manager at the Rio in Las Vegas. He had a couple try to book a room but the hotel was completely sold out. Shortly after he got a call from housekeeping that an older couple was found unresponsive and most likely deceased in their room. They called the police, and the authorities removed the bodies. Not long after, housekeeping cleaned the room. Seeing that the earlier couple was nearby, the manager called them over and offered them the room. They were ecstatic and took it not knowing what had just occurred. The manager gave them a discount on the bill
We over book rooms just like a flight over books seats. If your method of payment isn't authorizing enough money for what you have been spending we'll have the valet give your keys to the front desk and we'll lock you out of the room until you get a new method of payment.
Even if many people don’t show up, I still don’t think it’s ethical to overbook things.
We know criminal enterprises have funded casinos in the past. I worked at Revel Casino (Ocean Casino Resort) in Atlantic City before and after its opening. One thing they kept mentioning in our onboarding was that the triads (a Chinese transnational organized crime syndicate) were funding the casino. I thought it was super strange that these execs were just openly telling this to brand-new hires.
I find that hard to believe. Usually not even a lot of management are openly aware of this. Sounds like they were just trying to scare new staff to "behave"
During housekeeping, hotels use different-colored cloths to wipe your drinking glasses, cutlery, toilets, and sinks to avoid contamination. They just don't bother separating these cloths after wiping and moving to the next room.
Worked a while back at a 5-Star/5 Diamond resort in Vegas in room service. At that time, if you bought a bottle of booze for your room and didn’t open it (including putting it out with your dishes), then it is re-sold. Was very frequent.
If it's unopened I don't see the problem. What are they meant to do? Waste it by throwing it away?
Note: this post originally had 51 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
Well, at least we learnt about the waffle thing 🤢
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Well, at least we learnt about the waffle thing 🤢
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