Most hotel guests probably assume the front desk staff forgets about rude customers the second they walk away.
Apparently…not always. 😬
There’s been a longtime warning that you should never be rude or demanding to your server in a restaurant, because there’s nothing stopping them from spitting in your meal before it’s delivered to your table.
I honestly don’t know if that’s true or not. But even if there’s a problem with my food, I’m always kind and polite to the server when I’m at a restaurant (to be fair, you should always be kind and polite anyway – but for some entitled people that seems to be more difficult when something isn’t living up to their expectations).
The same thing goes for the people who work the front desk at a hotel.
They may not have the opportunity to spit in your food. But they certainly have the upper hand when it comes to passive-aggressively doing little things to make your hotel stay that much more unpleasant.
Not long ago, I found a post on Reddit that was written by someone who said they worked at a hotel, at the front desk. They said that whenever they encountered a guest checking in who was rude, they would wait for them to get on the elevator, and then deactivate the guest’s key card. That would mean they’d go to the room, the key card wouldn’t work, and they’d have to go back down to the front desk (with all their luggage, if they were alone) to get it reactivated.
They’d admit this meant they’d have to deal with the rude guest again, but I guess they felt it was worth it (they said, “I always smiled so hard on the inside over their tiny inconvenience”).
And they made sure to mention that sometimes key cards can be a “dud.”
Someone asked, in response to this story, “I think I’m 95% nice, so that time my room key didn’t work, had I done something inadvertently or was the key a dud?” Their response was:
“Haha honestly probably just a dud! Sometimes we’d get a bad batch of new keys and like 50% wouldn’t work, very annoying at times.”
Whew! 😉
The post got over 4,000 upvotes, and a ton of replies from others who said they’d done similar things. Here are a couple of the better stories:
Parking garage access
One hotel front desk worker admitted they only intentionally “got back” at a guest once — but they REALLY committed to the bit.
They said, the guest arrived already furious and immediately began unloading about every inconvenience he’d dealt with that day: delayed flights, terrible food, road construction…you name it. Then, despite none of it having anything to do with the hotel, he demanded a room upgrade as compensation for his horrible day.
There was just one problem.
The guest apparently wasn’t a loyalty member, had never stayed at the hotel before, and the property was completely sold out. So there was literally nothing available to upgrade him to.
Instead of accepting that, the guest allegedly lost it — calling the employee incompetent and throwing around insults before storming off to park his car.
That’s when the employee decided to quietly get even.
The hotel shared a parking garage with a busy downtown shopping center, and getting into it required a working room key. The entrance itself was also awkwardly located down a long, winding alleyway that was difficult to back out of if something went wrong.
So as soon as the guest walked away from the desk, the employee deactivated his room key.
Sure enough, the guest eventually returned to the front desk absolutely furious after discovering he couldn’t access the garage and had apparently spent quite a while struggling to get back out of the alley.
Meanwhile, the front desk worker said they just stood there smiling internally while the guest completely melted down.
Beware the 4th floor
I used to work at a hotel where the 4th level and under it was blocked by a building so whenever I got rude guests I’d put them on the 4th floor and under and all the way down the hall so they’d have to walk lol
And not just hotels…cruises too!
Another reply:
I used to work on cruise ships in the gift shops and always wondered why there was a magnet under the counter. Realised it was when a customer was rude you could swipe their card (they pay with their room cards) on the magnet and deactivate it, so couldn’t get back into their room and would have to go to the pursers desk to reactivate it.
Lesson learned
At the end of the day, most hotel (and cruise) employees probably aren’t sitting around plotting revenge against difficult guests.
They’re just trying to get through long shifts dealing with stressed-out travelers, unrealistic demands, and the occasional person who apparently thinks screaming at customer service workers is an acceptable personality trait.
But these stories are a good reminder that the people working the front desk, the gift shop, or guest services often have a surprising amount of control over your experience.
So even if that old “don’t annoy the server or they’ll spit in your food” warning is mostly an urban legend…being rude to the people helping you during your travels still might not be the smartest strategy. 😏
As one of the people who replied to the thread said, “I never understood why people are rude to people who can inconvenience them the most.”
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