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Hotel Workers Share The Craziest Things They've Ever Seen Happen At 5-Star Hotels

Styaing in a hotel can feel like an exciting, foreign experience for those who don't travel often. To make the most of it, they might even seek out the fancier ones, 5-star hotels with superior service and facilities.

What happens behind the scenes of those hotels, though? Someone on Reddit asked employees of 5-star hotels to share some wild things they've seen, and some of those stories have been captured here in this list.

A lot for a little.

Unsplash | Tony Yakovlenko

"Middle eastern royalty books an entire floor for a month. Staff spends weeks preparing for every detail of the visit. Entire floor rearranged to accommodate children, nannies, private dining quarters for men and women, etc. Private chef is brought in.

"They left after one week (on private 747) because it was too cold. In Chicago. In November."

Dark considerations.

Unsplash | Eunice Stahl

"Dead people. In some places there's a reasonable chance somebody has died in your bed. Obviously it varies with the type of hotel and its clientele, but some places you get deaths weekly (not that the hotel is unsafe but unfit old people over exerting themselves).

"One place I worked maybe 40% of the beds had been died in."

Talking the talk.

Unsplash | Luis González Sosa

"Our concierge was Les Clefs D'or, had all the connections, this dude could get you into the French Laundry same day. He would often greet guests with sangria and sprigs of mint from his garden. Sometimes he had lemon slices from his tree too! He loved to tell guests all about his garden and they ate it up.

"Yeah that's all [expletive]. Mint, lemon, and any other garnish we got from the local grocery store. The sangria? Cheapest boxed stuff we could find. But he sold the story like no other. At the end of the day, it worked."

Cold hard cash.

Pexels | Karolina Grabowska

"Had to procure $100k cash for a guest whose wife wanted to shop on Rodeo Drive the next morning, the local bank doesn’t even have that much. Had to get an armored car from the central LA bank branch to deliver."

Bring your own.

Unsplash | Yu Heng

"Never trust [glasses] in rooms. GRAs are so stretched thin on time that they will clean the glasses with the same rags they clean the bathroom, after all their goal is to make the room look clean.

"I worked as a GRA in a five diamond for years and there was over a year period that went by where we didn’t get a clean glass delivery. We didn’t have dishwashers in the room, so management was complicit. This was in a five diamond, one of the top resorts in the world."

Dropped and forgotten.

Unsplash | Jannis Lucas

"At a certain Beverly Hills hotel, where I valet’d for a short amount of time, many stars cars are just left there. They come and get them whenever. There was also a code name for Justin Bieber who visited often (I can’t remember it).

"He picked it himself. His G-Wagon and a Bentley were just kept down there free of charge. Usher also left his bike there a few years back and has just never collected it."

Nice and quiet.

Pexels | Pixabay

"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."

A generous soul.

Pexels | John Guccione

"My SO worked for a fancy hotel. The building owners (not the chain, the actual building itself) came to visit. He was on the Forbes billionaire list. He was a nice man who had buffet lunches everyday and tipped every staff members he saw a crisp $100, every time he saw them.

"House keeper walking past? $100. Bar tender setting up? $100. Shift swap? 100 on the way in and out."

Tracked back.

Pexels | Martin Péchy

"I don’t know about all 5 [star] hotels but I’m sure this happens at most of them. Front desk/reservation staff will basically stalk you online if you’re a notable VIP and your picture will be shared internally to ensure everyone recognizes you so you feel special when you arrive and everyone already knows who you are."

The world's most hated pest.

Pexels | Engin Akyurt

"Bedbugs. Every single hotel from run down motels to 5-star resorts has dealt with bedbugs."

A former hotel employee added onto this, saying, "At the hotel I worked at [...] we quite literally weren’t allowed to say the word 'bedbugs.' As in, we could get in trouble for speaking the word out loud, even conversationally. Had to refer to them as 'BBs.' It was a little extra."

A laundry list.

Pexels | cottonbro

"Lmao I have so many stories and honestly I want to write a memoir about it. We legit had someone once break into the archive room and steal everyone’s credit card details. Nobody noticed until like a month later. [...]

"I’ve had to deal with people throwing the furniture off balconies and throw on to other guests cars. [...] And don’t even get me started on how ‘clean’ those rooms are.

"Your $1000/night does not reflect those standards. They still wash them tea cups in the bathroom sink or the bath tub."

Shady dealings.

Unsplash | Odd Fellow

"I worked at a 5 star hotel in England as a bartender. Hosted events and stuff. One thing that was common was my manager would just spam extra drinks onto the bill at events to make more money.

"Or for example if a big wedding ordered 50 bottles of champagne, they’d only give them 30 and would keep 20 back and if they ran out, they’d have to buy more.

"I reported this to Senior management and they just laughed saying it’s normal. I actually got told off for not taking part in this."

Big bucks to stay shut.

Pexels | Castorly Stock

"Did maintenance at some hotels as pure grunt labor. People will flush anything down a toilet. Towels, sheets, [...] pillows, paper, food, bottles, and just [about] everything else.

"Best one ever, got a call to snake a toilet in a room. Twitchy Latin guy tells me it is super important I be careful to not damage said flushed item. Gotcha. I managed to fish out his bags of various powders and pills out without breaking a single bag open.

"He offered me some product as a tip, and when I declined, just handed me a stack of $20s and ushered me out the door. It was an $1,800 tip."

A difference in treatment.

Pexels | cottonbro

"I worked in security for one and housekeeping called us all the time for drugs they’d find in a room. The first thing we’d ask for is the room number and we’d look up the name of the guest. If it was a VIP or someone important to us we’d tell them to leave it there and 'we’d take care of it.'

"If the guest was someone we didn’t know and not important to us we’d go up there and take it out of the room, then threaten to evict them from their stay if they did it again."

Elevated escalation.

Pexels | Michael Morse

"One hotel I worked at hosted a Christmas party for an investment firm and two guys started jockeying for the affections of a female coworker. They all wound up on an elevator together and the guys started fighting, the elevator went in to safety lock down [...].

"One guy went in a squad car, one guy went in an ambulance, we had to give the woman some clothes from lost & found because her dress was covered in blood and the elevator was out of service for six hours to clean it up."

Not a clue.

Pexels | cottonbro

"I don't work there but once I got a very nice suite in Las Vegas for my Wife's Birthday. When you caught the selling [sic] in the right light you could see a hand print on the ceiling that I sure was from a hand covered in lube.

"It had that snail trail effect. The ceiling was also 10 ft tall and it was in the middle of the room with no good way to hit that part of the ceiling."

Lucky find.

Unsplash | Roman Synkevych

"Housekeeping found $10000 dollars in cash but the guest never called for lost money so after 3 months, the house keeper got to keep it per company rules. That was probably the highlight of her career."

Extreme dangers.

Unsplash | Gianandrea Villa

"Actual bomb. In the driveway on the other side of the wall from my bar. The cops set up blocks within a two block radius. Mind you, we were a massive hotel in a downtown center directly across from the convention center.

"Management had us clear everyone from the bar but we had to stick around ‘just in case we had to reopen and serve drinks to guests’. [...] Above us, many sleeping guests were clueless until they finally evacuated the hotel at 4 in the morning."

Grosser than expected.

Pexels | Castorly Stock

"I worked as a housekeeper for a Marriott hotel, and we were told not to change pillow cases unless they looked dirty considering they didn’t want to do that much laundry everyday."

Finally, a review.

Pexels | cottonbro

Someone who is not a hotel employee, but a guest, had the unfortunate experience of reading through this list. All they had to say was, "I’m reading these while laying in a hotel bed and I don’t like this."

A feeling I'm sure we all resonate with, now.

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