17 Hotel Workers Who Got a Big Surprise From Their Guests

It’s not just tips that hotel customers leave behind, guests often leave things that don’t quite fit the concept of “light mess.” Welcome to the world of unexpected hotel secrets!

• My friend’s family ran a little hotel at the beach. Nothing fancy, but it was oceanfront. My friend once went to a room to clean, and found the entire place clean. Not just wiped up, etc.
  The walls and ceilings had been scrubbed, the carpets looked like they had been shampooed, the tub/shower looked brand new (quite an accomplishment at the beach with super hard water and salt spray), the bed frame had been cleaned, the old beach furniture had been cleaned and repaired, the knobs and track on the sliding glass door had been polished, the railings on the deck had been thoroughly scrubbed, the dirty linens were stripped and folded with a sign saying “dirty.” © Ba**************sh / Reddit
• Some kids accidentally broke open one of those foam pillows. The ones you can shape into anything and they are very comfy. Well, it’s full of tiny pellets. They were excited about the snow and the parents had stepped out, so they jammed it into the HVAC unit and turned it on.
  The HVAC unit shot out little snowy specs into the air and actually looked like snow to our housekeeper’s horror. The maintenance technician turned it on immediately after she cleaned it up to see if it was working correctly. It wasn’t. © ****_Sally / Reddit
• I went to the room after guests. The room was trashed with garbage everywhere and literally a pizza slice stuck to the ceiling (which I’m assuming was made purposefully as a joke?) but one thing stuck out. The fridge was missing. I looked around but couldn’t find it. “Did they steal it?”
  The moment I entered the other bedroom suite, which was as well trashed but not as bad as the previous one, and went in one of the bedrooms, I finally saw it. The fridge was there. They moved the fridge from one suite to the other and put it next to the bed. We charged them for the trashed room. © 54rtrt / Reddit
• I was a housekeeper for 3 weeks in a classy boutique hotel when I first moved to a different country before finding a better job. The first room I cleaned was one of the fancier suites, and upon opening the door, it was clear the occupants had set off numerous confetti crackers the night before.
  There was golden confetti everywhere. But most of it was concentrated in the bed and in the big clawfoot bathtub. Then a trail of wet confetti to the shower. Nightmare to clean up. © mockinbirdwishmeluck / Reddit

• A former colleague used to work as a hotel housekeeper. The strangest thing he ever found was a guest who had left the mini fridge filled to the brim with sausages. © amvoloshin / Reddit
• I only have found a little cute bat in a room sleeping on the carpet. It wanted to sleep, so it didn’t bother at all when I was moving it away. © cat_******24 / Reddit
• I walked into a room to begin the cleaning, when I noticed the carpet by the bathroom door was wet. I opened the door to see an overflowing toilet, it was disgusting. The people that stayed in the room the previous night had tried to flush a diaper, and instead of telling the receptionist about the problem, they just kept going on top of it.
  I found my supervisor, showed her the mess, and was told to scoop out the bowl and plunge it. I handed over my smock and left. © Unknown author / Reddi
• I was cleaning a room after a guest had checked out, and it was nice to see that they had made the bed before leaving. Obviously I was going to have to re-make it with fresh clean sheets, but it demonstrated a level of respect for the hotel and staff. I had all the new sheets prepared, and I was aware of a small mound underneath the top cover.
  Not thinking too much of it I pulled it back and something shot out toward me and started flapping in a panic in my face before flying around the room dropping all over the place looking for a way out. It was a pigeon. Some bad person had seemingly plucked the poor thing from the window and thought the aftermath would be funny.
  The aftermath was chasing a terrified pigeon toward an open window for half an hour, droppings scrubbing and back and forth discussions about tetanus shots. © ThatsAStrangeName / Reddit
• When I was staying at a motel on a road trip, we left our cat behind in the room. We couldn’t find him in the morning after we had loaded the car, and thought he had escaped through our feet when we weren’t looking. We checked everywhere and the only place he could be was underneath the bed, which was blocked off, except for a small crack we thought the cat was too much of a fatty to fit through.
  Apparently he wasn’t too fat and hid, without making a sound. They found him waiting on the bed the next morning and called us. We drove 6 hours back to pick him up! © Linith / Reddit

• I don’t know which maid ended up having to find this, but: a couple of days ago on a road trip, I broke off one of my incisors eating kubideh (I know, hard to do with ground meat), about a centimeter-long chunk, everything but the root. I kept the tooth and had it on the desk in my hotel room; at one point I accidentally knocked it onto the floor and I thought, “I need to remember to pick that up before I leave.”
  I didn’t remember, so I’m just hoping the maid vacuumed it up without noticing what it was. © Unknown author / Reddit
• I’m terrified of spiders. It’s been a major phobia of mine since childhood. A month ago, I went on a business trip and stayed in a hotel. I came out of the shower and saw that a huge spider was crawling near the bed!
  I squealed, ran back into the bathroom and locked myself in. I started to panic, was terrified to come out. I wanted to call reception to get the spider removed. But the phone was on the bedside table!
  I put a towel on the floor and dozed in the bathroom all night. Luckily, in the morning a maid knocked on the door, came in and saved me. © Chamber 6 / VK
• According to the maid: she came in to clean the room. Guests have not yet left, intermediate cleaning. In the bathroom, there was half a pizza in a box on the floor. Naturally, she threw it away. The guests complained.
  Turns out they were warming up the pizza. The bathroom has heated floors. They ate half of the pizza, then put the other half “to warm up,” while they went for a walk and put up a sign “Clean the room.” © Overheard / VK
• Was on a lazy holiday at the sea and already didn’t know what else to get myself busy with. I visited all interesting places, swam in the sea, sunbathed on the beach, tasted local dishes. It became frankly boring, despite the fact that I wasn’t alone there. That’s why I came up with a weird hobby quite by accident.
  I noticed that towel figures, made by the maids, depend on the amount of a tip. So, I gradually left a bigger and bigger tip and admired their creativity. On my last day of holiday, I got a full-sized towel person with fruit on top of it. It seems I’m not the only one bored here. © Ward No. 6 / VK

• I worked room service at a hotel. One of the funniest things I remember seeing was during a delivery for a honeymoon package. The second I walked into the room, I could say that I was not the first person to have been in there.
  Someone had tossed rose petals around the room and added some decorations for their magical night. The one that stood out though: a 3’x3′ print out of the bride’s father with a massive, cheesy grin and a thumbs-up. It was taped to the ceiling directly above the bed. © Unknown author / Reddit
• I worked at a hotel, and this guy that had been staying with us for a month was checking out. He didn’t leave me a tip but goes, “Check the bottom drawer on the nightstand, that’s for you.”
  So, I go up to his room, look at the bottom drawer, and it was full of only dimes and nickels totaling $40. No quarters, no pennies, no dollar bills, only dimes and nickels. It was the weirdest thing ever, but hey, that was a good tip. © DubsTx / Reddit
• My mom is the manager of a housekeeping department in a hotel. Recently, she had gone into a room to check it out for a cash deposit. There was a neck pillow and a large, rather lumpy looking pillow left on the bed.
  Just as she was about to pick both of them up, the phone rang. She went over and answered it. It was the front desk, in a panic, telling her that there was a snake in the room. Just as she was being told this information, she noticed that the lumpy pillow had started to move.
  She slowly put down the phone, and walked out of the room backwards. The next thing she knew, the guest that had been in that room came flying down the hallway like a bat out of hell, apologizing to her. © psytramp / Reddit
• I work at a hotel as a maid. Today I was cleaning a room where a couple with a child, about 2–3 years old, stays. The mother and child came to the room when I was finishing cleaning.
  She asked me for the vacuum cleaner and did a very strange thing: she disconnected the brush, left the hose, and connected some kind of tube to it. Then she put the tube up the child’s nose and turned the vacuum cleaner on. This way, she helped her child to get rid of phlegm and shocked me at the same time. © Ward 6 / VK

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