A guest stealing from a hotel is hardly a new thing. Many guests go home with towels, pillows, blankets, etc. There was one individual who definitely wins the award for brazen stupidity.
This charming individual and his female companion checked into the hotel in the early morning. Naturally they took the most expensive room we had and paid cash to do so.
You may think that paying cash is no big deal. To someone working the front desk of a hospitality operation it is a big red flag.
Hospitality Rule: Don’t Pay Cash
Some lodging properties will actually refuse you lodgings if you try to pay cash. You might be asking why would a business turn down cash? After all cash doesn’t come with the fees credit card companies charge for processing. The answer is people paying with cash are often trying to fly under the radar. They don’t want a paper trail.
A host of questions come to the mind of hoteliers when a guest tries to pay cash. Are they drug dealers? Are they human traffickers? Maybe they are just cheating on their significant other. I digress so back to our suspicious couple.
I was in my office going through my daily routine when my housekeepers all piled into my office. They all excitedly tried to tell me about a guest loading up all the furniture from his room. They led me out to the parking area where sure enough sat large cushioned armchairs, tables, artwork, and more. Some piled on the ground, others in the back of a small pickup truck.
When I returned to the front desk to get his information, I found him already there. He was trying to bully the front desk agent into a full refund for his stay. He kept name dropping every official he had ever heard of. He kept saying how they would shut us down for this or that. As he talked his speech slurred and he was wobbly all tell tale signs of intoxication. I asked him why he was loading furniture up in his truck. He said the big black maintenance guy said it was all free because it was just junk.
I had to suppress a laugh at his description. Just for context the area our hotel was in was not known for its ethnic diversity. Every person on staff was either Caucasian or Native American.
I informed him we didn’t have anyone on staff that met his description working in the hotel. We in fact had no maintenance personnel at all at that time. The man sputtered a bit an kept insisting our hotel was dangerous. He was calling authorities to shut us down if we didn’t give him a refund.
I told him he wasn’t getting a refund and that he needed to return all the items he was taking. He stormed away from the desk and out to his truck in the parking lot. He tried to tell me the furniture was his and that he had brought it with him. After arguing with me for a couple minutes he walked away and I followed him.
He returned to his room and slammed the door in my face. I began pounding on the door insisting he open the door. I heard the toilet being flushed repeatedly as they ignored me.
I took the stairs back downstairs and found several pieces of furniture on the steps. He had been taking not just items from the room but from all over the hotel. When I got back to the front desk I was introduced to a guest who had seen the man trying to haul furniture down the stairs. Apparently the guest had helped the would be thief carry a couple of pieces of furniture down the stairs. It seems the guest had mistaken the thief for a maintenance man. He felt bad for this ’employee’ who was working with no help and decided to lend a hand.
I contacted the police who quickly responded. I showed the officers the pile of furniture in the parking lot. Then the furniture on the stairs as we went to his room. The police got him to come out of the room. While two officers began questioning him I walked through the room with another officer. Inside pictures were smashed and trash was everywhere. The toilet had small baggies floating in it.
They had been flushing the drugs they had before the police could show up. The police checked and found the man had several warrants for his arrest already and they took him into custody. His female companion had just been released from a ten-month sentence in jail the day they had checked in.
We would learn later on the woman was actually the girlfriend of the mans father. The father had been arrested the month before at another hotel after setting up a drug lab in a room.
All in all it was a day that will stay with me. Ironically, several days later a city building inspector showed up. The inspector had been called by a man insisting our building was dangerous and needed to be shut down. It seems the would be thief used his phone call to call the city to complain about our building.
For the record after looking over the building and hearing the story the inspector declared our hotel safe.