15 Hotel Stories That Are So Wild, They Sound Like They’re Made Up

When we think of a hotel, we think of a place where we can relax and unwind while on holiday. But for the staff who work in them, things can get a little messy. Here are 15 stories from hotel workers that might have you rethinking your next booking.

• Guests left three-week-old expired milk in the fridge. But they were only in-house for three days, so that means it was already two and a half weeks expired when they checked in. Who lugs around rotten milk? © llcucf80 / Reddit

• My friend owned a small hotel. One night, I was there when he got a call from one of the guests saying he heard a loud crash in the room next door. We checked the computer and saw that the room was unoccupied. We knocked at the door, and there was no answer. We opened it and were horrified to find a cat in the room. It had knocked over a lamp and smashed it. My friend took ownership of the cat, and now she is the motel cat. She walks all around the property and takes care of any mice or critters. She even has her picture on the wall as one of the “employees.”
  © mrsheikh / Reddit

• This happened last week. Saw a guy inspecting a coconut tree. Apparently, he decided he really wanted to climb a coconut tree at 1 am. I didn’t see him fall. Just heard the thud. Nothing serious happened to him. He just got the wind knocked out of him and passed out.
  © squirrelbeanie / Reddit

• Not my story, but a colleague’s: A man came to reception complaining that the microwave didn’t work. We didn’t have microwaves in the room. He tried to microwave a pizza in the safe.
  © Limmmao / Reddit

• I worked at a larger hotel/event space. Someone accidentally let loose a lab rat in one of the rooms. The guest at least had the courtesy to call down to the front desk and let us know that they needed help catching it. Maintenance, and the guest after looking for hours could not find the rat and eventually gave up. We had multiple call downs to the front desk over the next few weeks from terrified guests who spotted it. I don’t know if they ever caught that giant rat. This is one of many absurd stories that came out of that place. © salamandereere / Reddit

• A guest called the police for a noise complaint about another room. The police arrived and went up to the noisy room with a front desk receptionist.
  When they got there, they found a woman, her two kids, her ex-husband, her aunt, and another random man. They were deep-frying chicken in the room at around 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. I remember seeing a man run out of the lobby with his deep fryer, spilling oil all over the place. © c***hiegoo / Reddit

• The bathroom sink and other random areas were filled with Greek olives. They were EVERYWHERE!! © Unusual_Figure_9728 / Reddit

• I was back after a few days off and doing my nightly floor check. I smelled something awful in one of the stairway. Opened the door to one of the fire dept. water valves to find someone had stuck a frozen pizza (in the box, thankfully) and left it there to rot. Probably some teenager who thought it would be funny. © AshleyJewel913 / Reddit

• I once had a man check in at night. He came back down and complained that he couldn’t see the ocean from his room. It was night.
  He kept arguing with me until I finally said, “Sir, I assure you, the ocean is there.” The hotel was less than 50 feet from the beach. © SecretBaker8 / Reddit

• We had a guest who constantly claimed that his room was dirty. We were 100% sure that it wasn’t because our Housekeeping Manager would check every room herself. And she did a few special checks after he complained. He got mad that we wouldn’t come to check the room anymore. But we didn’t expect what we found after he left. He just checked out, leaving all of his belongings in the room. Phone, laptop, passport, even his clothes, that happened to be very dirty.

• My buddy works at a hotel and shared this crazy story: a guest requested a room full of balloons for a surprise party. The staff spent all night blowing up balloons, only for the guest to check out without even seeing the room! © shyrochyn / Reddit

• I work as a receptionist at the front desk. There was this one time when my eyes happened to drift towards the morning self-service buffet camera. It was 09:30, and I saw one guest filling his glass with fresh orange juice from the jug. He sipped twice, and he threw the leftover inside the jug again. © Ligkonakos / Reddit

• As the owner of a bed and breakfast for the last eight years, the craziest thing I ever found was an old, battered notebook with “Why I Love Salad” written on the front. Inside were literally 40–80 pages about how amazing salad is. Every now and then, the author suggested they believed salad to be alive in some sense. It looked like it had been written on and off over the course of several years. © D***musyo / Reddit

• Reservation came in, and they wanted the furniture removed from the room prior to arrival. When they showed up, the room was for two movie cougars (cats). They were filming a movie called Viva Las Nowhere. The cats were cool... © lauie / Reddit

• Worked as a night auditor in college. Checked rooms in the morning to verify if we would return the security deposit from weekend guests. One room had clothes, a driver’s license, and what looked like half a head of hair scattered throughout the room. Looks like someone decided to give themselves a haircut while walking around. © EnglishWh*** / Reddit

Hotel workers aren’t the only one who experience jaw-dropping moments. Check out this article, to what some medical professionals have had to put up with.