5-Star Hotel Employees Spill The Tea On Hotel Secrets, And Some Get Really Dark (30 Answers)
As of 2023, there are around 187K hotels in the world with approximately 17.5M guestrooms. The pandemic has significantly impacted this industry, which is a major player in the global economy. However, the sector is bouncing back and is expected to see 7% growth from 2021 to 2025.
However, the comeback might not be as glamorous as it sometimes looks from the outside. There's a new Reddit post that asked "People who work in super luxury hotels, what's the one thing management doesn’t want normal citizens to know?" and the replies show that there's definitely more than meets the eye.
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This is a bit different but funny
I used to be in the entertainment business and traveled worldwide non stop. I always flew with a few suites and a tux with it in a separate dark garment bag.
I was in NYC for a show and was asked to wear a tux for the event. No problem…. That’s why I have it…. But I did not have it. I had it before in maybe Chicago but multiple hotels unpacking, repacking and I managed to lose the entire garment bag
I freak out and figured out the last 4-5 hotels and called each one. No tux and all said they would have called me if the maid found after checkout.
Get a call from security from a well known hi end hotel in LA later that day. Security went to the room and the garment bag was squished into the dark corn of the closet and had been there about two weeks with multiple guests!
They offered to overnight it to me…. I sent a very nice thank you e mail.
About 6 months later I check into the LA hotel again. As I received my key the front desk asked if I could like to leave a forwarding address for my tux this time 🤓
Actually met the guy who found it and tipped him $100
We turn a blind eye to drug dealers and prostitutes more often than you think. They hardly complain and usually pre pay huge bonds happily. Also we don't give a s**t if you're having an affair
A lot of lonely people going on vacation to end their life. Happens a lot but is never mentioned on the news.
You can tell the difference between the new money and the old money. You can take the old money down the pub and they get on well with everyone. New money tends to be a bit snobby and wants to associate with other people who are like them.
It’s hard to describe.
Hotel chains have a "list of banned customers" circulated among their member hotels, for those customers who have created a lot of issues in the past including criminal issues, absconding etc.
I stayed at a lovely little boutique hotel on our honeymoon once in the South of France. It was home to a Michelin star restaurant. They knew every time we walked out of the room and approximately how long we would be gone because our room would be tidied every single time we left it for more than like 5 mins and a new compote of fresh fruit from the property on my dressing table. The whole place knew our names and our rental car on sight (even the front gate to the property would open automatically, there was no like “rolling down the window and talking to the intercom” after the first time we arrived). And they packed picnics and things for our outings without us ever asking like, “Hello Weddingelly, I know you mentioned you are going out to hike tomorrow, we packed you a picnic of fresh pastries and charcuterie from our chef for your trip and here are two umbrellas in case it rains.” Another time we were looking for some small restaurant in the village and the front desk person, instead of just giving us directions, walked us there. It was so incredible, I was speechless
Edit: sorry I am in Chicago for a wedding this weekend and so did not check til now. It was the Bastide at Marie St Moustieres and its actually only a 4 star: https://www.bastide-moustiers.com/en/
But actually in France it is not uncommon to have this level of service. We also had very good experiences at Les Bories in Gordes (5 star, has Michelin star restaurant), Alain Llorca in Colle de Loup next to St Paul de Vence (4 star, has a michelin star restaurant), Hotel Bevengudo in Les Baux de Provence (4 star, no michelin restaurant but chef is michelin trained with Alain Ducasse) just to name a few standout ones.
There are many small places to stay that are exquisite and with excellent food throughout that area. We went in late October and it was very nice and quiet
Completely standard in France, Italy or Switzerland as long as you stay away from the chains or the cheap hotels in city centers for the ryanair crowd. The level of hospitality for the price is unrivaled.
I won't name it for obvious NDA reasons, but I used to manage a lodge style hotel up in the Rockies. Lovely, old place, all the top people had stayed there back in the day. Beautiful furnishings, native art, log fires, a big, big ballroom, very like those lodges in Yosemite or Yellowstone, but privately owned, not NPS/Xanterra. It always closes for the winter (it was just too expensive to keep the road clear) and anyway about 40 years ago now the caretaker I hired for the off-season, he seemed a nice young man, went nuts and tried to kill his wife and son. I still think about that.
Don't know about super luxury, but the amount of food waste would make you lose your faith in humanity in a hot second.
What goes on the room next to you. This week we to evict and have arrested a couple for causing over $15K in damages to a room. This was done quietly late at night and the nearby rooms never found out.
I was going to ask how nobody heard, and then I remembered nobody heard all the s**t that happened in 'The Hangover', including dragging a tiger into the penthouse suite, so I guess sometimes Hollywood shows us real life things.
I worked at a hotel in a ski town that has a very “secret” system of tracking guests preferences and information. From their dogs name all the way down to their preference of pillow firmness.
They told us it was vital that guests never find out about the stored info as it would come off as creepy.
I don't think that's the reason, because that's precisely what the clients of these hotels are looking for, that level of attention. What is really happening is that there is a European data protection regulation that would oblige them to let the clients know that they keep that information and also that they do it in a secure way and with all the precautions and I am sure that most of the luxury hotels are not in a position to do it.
At an extremely luxurious hotel in downtown Seattle I worked in the kitchen and had the task of making breakfast lunch and dinner for pair of award-winning shizu. Chicken bone broth for Brea, the plain chick from the broth at noon and chicken and rice around ten. They usually stayed anywhere between a week and two. And even with this extremely strict diet they develop diarrhea every day and the room had to be spotlessly deep cleaned while the pup had their daily visit to the groomers.
This may have been more manageable except it had to be served at the same time the owners decided they wanted to eat so obviously the dogs ate with them. If course they did.
So basically luxury hotels will do just about anything to keep their luxury reputation. I have many more and many more disturbing stories if anyone asks but they have that same moral of the story. They get what they want free of consequence. Always.
The hotel rooms are not as clean as the people checking in assume. Most cleaning is done at most in a 15 minute period and lots is reused. Some cleaners don't even use water although they would say they did. I used to work in a hotel which was considered fancy as a housekeeper and the things I saw make it hard for me to stay at a hotel to this day. Faster, faster and faster is the motto for cleaning and if things don't look dirty ...that is fine.
That we don't wash our comforters unless we physically see a spot on them
Place I worked at put an extra flat sheet OVER the comforter. The logic was it kept the comforter cleaner from spills, etc. All it did was make extra work for the housekeeping staff/laundry folks as those sheets didn't help much.
There's loads of prostitution.
I was thinking uncleaned carpets when I saw the picture before headline.
Billionaire shat in the elevator multiple times, management didn’t stop him. We had to keep track when he used the elevator, to ensure we clean the mess before anyone else would find it.
I work in one of the most highly-rated hotels in my country (allegedly, Tbh they brag about it constantly but I haven't fact-checked their claims LOL) Like I'm talking the rooms go anywhere from $350-$1300 a night. The thing I'm always so fast to tell people is the housekeepers are super overworked and room cleans are super rushed. The more busy it is the less clean your room is. There are jacuzzi's in some of the rooms and they aren't cleaned ever. Sometimes staff drop linen on the dirty a*s floors and don't have time to rewash it so they just shake off the dirt, fold it, and put it away. Worst of all, since the housekeepers are so rushed and have such limited time sometimes duvet covers won't be changed because it takes too long. There are also helllla rats. Lastly, even though they make tens of millions of dollars a year they treat their employees super s****y and pay 3 dollars below market rate. No idea if all fancy hotels are like this but yikes. I wouln't pay 20 dollars to stay there LMAO
This is a fairly common pattern with chain hotels whose stock is publicly traded. Larger investment funds owning their shares demand a certain degree of annual growth along with across-the-board cost cutting. Classier operations, privately owned, will have an easy time poaching their better staff, leaving the chain hotels even worse off with even less motivated personnel.
Those drinking glasses in your room? They never leave the room. They get sprayed with the same stuff we use to clean the toilet and then rinsed in the sink. That ice bucket that 1,000 people have puked in? Also, never leaves the room. That big nice tub? It's probably been completely coated in s**t before. The sheets, pillow cases and smaller blankets get washed after each guest (unless you get a lazy housekeeper that just f*****g doesn't change the bedding), but that comforter is washed like a few times a year. If you don't see it on the housekeeping carts, it's not regularly changed.
Worked at a four seasons back in the day, the quality of staff is sub par because they wont pay there staff properly.
They use foreign workers and pay them dirt cheap with always the fear or you losing your job if you don’t work when they tell you too, no days off, terrible staff meals, s****y dorm rooms shared with 6 other people.
Fun times
I worked in a very nice hotel 30+ years ago. Not super luxury, but very nice. The GM insisted that we use the fire exits in the non-public areas as storage. So they were completely blocked off. The fire department would do their routine checks for safety, but they always notified the management ahead of time. So the employees were told to run around and move the stuff away from the exits, then put it all back after the inspection was over.
All inspections - factory, school, hospital, safety - should be carried out without prior notice. Absolutely pointless otherwise.
You'd be surprised about the lack of camera coverage. In every hotel I've worked at, cameras were only directed at first floor entrances, the elevators, the bar if we had one, the front desk, and the room we had the money safe/electronic equipment in. So basically, entrances + places where money was held or exchanged. None on the individual floors, none aimed at the parking lot.
The op must think that because in American procedural series there are always cameras all over the hotel, we think that in real life it happens too. There is something called privacy. In Spain at least it should be notified with a sign that the area is monitored by cameras and the least expected in a luxury hotel is to find those signs throughout the hotel because it also gives the image of being an unsafe hotel because that's why they have put the cameras.
I worked for hotels for a few years until covid. Some of the things I learned weren’t too shocking but I’m surprised how many people don’t know them…also a lot of things I learned were so very dark. Learned a lot about how people function in secret since so many people treat hotels like rules don’t apply there. Here are some:
1. Never ever eat buffet eggs. They are liquid from a giant bag.
2. Hotels have regulars that come once or twice a month to entertain their darkest addictions. We all know what they are doing there and keep their secrets for them unless something bad happens. For instance there was a local well known surgeon who would check in for a weekend every once in a while so he could take whippets and trip balls. The last time he came he got so f****d up he destroyed the room with bodily functions and was banned for life from any hotel within that company. We tried to charge his card for the damages but it was declined. We called his cell but he wouldn’t answer so we had to call his home. His wife answered and as soon as we said who we were she said “did he do it again????”
He wasn’t the only double life guest we had…just the most memorable one.
3. Almost every married man that came in on a business trip would take his ring off while checking in and come back later with a random woman. Always broke my heart.
4. There are rats in every kitchen of every hotel in every city in the world. Just accept it.
5. We never washed the duvets unless you could see a stain.
6. The amount of trafficking happening within hotels is disgusting and alarming. We were trained extensively on spotting it. Within the first year of working in my first hotel (which was brand new) we had 3 different cases of young girls being trafficked and we had to get the fbi involved. Those are only the ones we were able to spot….
7. In certain cities if people stop paying for their rooms and refuse to leave there is nothing the hotel can do due to the local laws that protect squatters.
8. The employees f**k in the rooms. A lot.
I’m sure there’s more but these are the ones that seem to shock people the most.
I am not chocked the staff uses the room as long as I dont stay in them at the time. Free rooms, go ahead. Not like ordinary guest dont have sex a lot there.
I used to work at a 5* hotel in a famous ski town.
Management was so bad that there were times where we ran out of toilet paper to put in the room and they sent someone to buy at at the local grocery store (not the same quality) and they forced us to just leave 1 instead of 3. Also towels or linen. We didn't have enough sheets so we had to make the king beds with two queen sheets.
For the amount of money those people were paying, they were getting c**p quality products that's for sure.
Sometimes we didn't have time to exchange de glasses so we just washed them in the sink. Mind you this was such a fancy hotel that the housekeepers weren't allowed to use trolleys so we had to walk a lot and carry everything in our hands, arms. It was awful.
As someone that works in fine dining restaurants and knows people in high scale hotels like four seasons. they do mostly the same s**t as other places, rich people are just happier. Don't see a server for 10 minutes after they sit "ohhh no we are fine" meanwhile $20 entrée places people are trying to get free s**t for that. seriously blew my mind when I started working fine dining and talking to luxury hotel people. like nah they happy they have money lol, just buy good product (food quality or bed sheets) and they don't really give a f**k lol.
I work at a gym in an upscale gated community. We had to change the toilet paper to a fresh roll even if it was hardly used. On the plus side, we got to keep alot of toilet paper.
Some hotels are like this too.... if there's only a little left, but not enough to toss, you either have to leave it till it's out (which may be the next time someone goes in there) or change it completely and take the roll with you--you couldn't leave the partial roll on top like you do at home, it looks "tacky". I took the stuff home, came in handy during the COVID when people were buying all the TP in stores lol
They know if you're there with your wife or not, and would never make any indication.
Low-end places will say "welcome back" not recognising if the other had been there before.
so much of society is set up to automatically protect men. ugh.
Whitsunday islands, a certain island would confiscate any alcohol brought onto the island as they wanted to milk you for all you got. Also very dodgy employment contracts where the GM would laugh about it and think he was so clever where someone resigns and puts in notice only to be ejected off the island straight away with nowhere to go.
Now we have CEO's and owners of large businesses repeatedly attempt to eject themselves from the darn planet and keep failing. If you have massive funds and want to leave go ahead. Or at least realize no one really cares. The Legos I have in the other room would be more fun, cause less environmental damage, and no judging from people that may have lost sight on "being a person.". Probably took that rant a wee to far.
While on vacation in a popular spot we went out to eat, they had a high table turnover system.
There was a guy doing balloon animals. He'd go from table to table and my in-laws tried to catch him walking by. He quickly said he'd be right back. They got offended he made them wait.
I kept watching and basically he was the signal that the table was done eating and needed to be bussed and ready for the next guests.
I told my in-laws that and they argued it wasn't true but the manager came after we had been sitting for a while post it was our turn with the balloon guy and asked us to go to the bar if we we going to stay there any longer.
That everything they furnish your rooms with is s**t quality and breaks constantly. At least that's what the 5 star hotel I worked at was like. They spent over $3 mil renovating the whole thing, then filled the rooms with basically ikea furniture held together by glue. Then they charge $450 a night 🙃
The towels used in the kitchen are cut up old bath towels and wash cloths.
So from now on I will bring my own sheets and deep clean the room before using it.
some people do that, at least the cleaning part. They check every inch of the room, including looking for bed bugs.
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I'd love to be a hotel manager with free rein to do what I wanted. Most managers are duds and ignorant. It's simple : treat customers the way you would like to be treated.
What's really going to gross you out is that the one I worked at *saved the used soap*. You know when you take a shower and use the little soap they leave in the shower? They would take those and send them to a charity somewhere. Granted, the old stuff got melted down and made into new soap...still... kinda gross if you think about it.
So from now on I will bring my own sheets and deep clean the room before using it.
some people do that, at least the cleaning part. They check every inch of the room, including looking for bed bugs.
Load More Replies... I'd love to be a hotel manager with free rein to do what I wanted. Most managers are duds and ignorant. It's simple : treat customers the way you would like to be treated.
What's really going to gross you out is that the one I worked at *saved the used soap*. You know when you take a shower and use the little soap they leave in the shower? They would take those and send them to a charity somewhere. Granted, the old stuff got melted down and made into new soap...still... kinda gross if you think about it.
