Five-Star Hotel Workers Reveal 'Secrets Management Doesn't Want You To Know'

A five-star hotel is supposed to be the epitome of luxury, comfort and refinement. I say 'supposed to be'... I've never been to one, but this is what I hear.

Anyway, like any workplace, a top-notch hotel can appear very different outwardly to how staff see it behind the scenes.

Luckily for us, employees have been dishing the dirt on Reddit, where they were asked: "What type of s*** goes on that management doesn't want people to know?"

More than 3,300 comments have been left on the thread - and they're quite eye-opening.

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"We don't want you to know that the people who stayed in the room before you were f***ing nasty," one person said.

"Housekeeping gets the brunt of it. I've seen them carry out bags of used sex toys, peel used condoms off of every surface, and scrub s*** - actual human (presumably) s*** - off places there's no reason for human s*** to be.

"The worst, though, was the couple that wanted a home birth but not, you know, at home (because gross). We had to deal with that hazmat situation. F***ed them as hard as we could with penalties and fees, though."

Wowzer - so just 'cause people can afford a five-star hotel room, doesn't mean they're classy.

Another said: "LOTS of prostitution and all the drama/legal trouble that goes along with it.

"Corporate functions like conventions, parties, etc where there's an open bar almost always leads to something f***ed up happening.

"One hotel I worked at hosted a Christmas party for an investment firm and two guys started jockeying for the affections of a female co-worker. They all wound up on an elevator together and the guys started fighting, the elevator went in to safety lock down, we had to call the PD and the FD."

Another agreed that prostitution is rife.

Pexels/cottonbro

They said: "We don't bat an eye at prostitution or whatever goes on in the rooms as long as it doesn't affect other guests. Half the women that come to the bar are working girls looking for a sale. The only thing that the hotel industry ever really reports is human trafficking."

Sticking to the bleak theme, another added: "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 percent of the beds had been died in."

Another claimed the whole hotel rating system is fundamentally flawed.

They said: "The manager at a top-class London hotel told me that the hotel grading system in general is 'utter nonsense'. The problem, he said, is that the list of criteria to reach each of the star ratings is little more than a tick sheet, albeit with around 500 factors to consider.

"For example, one criterion for being considered five-star is fresh flowers being present in guest rooms, but there's a huge difference between a big ornate display of orchids and a bunch of daffodils.

"The presence of either would technically tick the box and in theory you could fulfil all the required five-star criteria yet be hugely inferior to the hotel next door that offers all the same things but at a much higher quality and standard."

You can check out the whole discussion here.

Topics: Interesting, Community, Reddit

Jake Massey

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

@jakesmassey