It all started when no one was at the front desk to greet them. So the friends stepped up, and soon they were in charge.
A Hangover, Missing Hotel Staff and a Horde of Angry Guests: This Is the Craziest Hotel Stay Ever
None of it would have happened if they hadn’t gone to the casino. If the three friends had driven straight to the hotel after the bars closed, they would have found a desk clerk on duty. They would have gotten their key, found their nice anonymous room and crashed in their nice anonymous budget-priced beds.
But the friends were out for adventure. It was Aaron Howard’s 28th birthday, and he, Kenzie Brooks and Noorain Dobani, all from the Atlanta area, were in Nashville to celebrate. The centerpiece would be a Wednesday night concert by one of Howard’s favorite bands, the Arctic Monkeys. But the first stop when they arrived in town on Tuesday was to hit Nashville’s famous bars, where they partied until closing time.
On their way to the hotel, with Dobani behind the wheel as the designated driver, they saw a sign for a casino in Kentucky. Oh, heck yeah!
They couldn’t resist one last stop. They got on the highway and headed north. The pals had fun even if they lost a few hundred bucks, and now they were all ready for bed. Next stop: the La Quinta Inn & Suites near the airport, an utterly unremarkable, yellow-painted box by the interstate, catering to tourists and long-stay guests. It was 5 a.m. when they arrived. They didn’t expect valet parking or a uniformed doorman. But they were expecting, well, somebody.
“No one,” says Dobani. “We’re in there waiting, and there’s absolutely no one.”
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A mystery … and then mayhem
There was no one behind the big front desk, there was no one in the lobby, there was no one in the office. The friends started to prowl around and soon found somebody, a housekeeper, who seemed as befuddled as they were. With no place to sleep and no way to get a key to their reserved room, they could have gotten back in the car and started looking for another hotel. But then they heard … a woman’s screams. From the elevator. Coming their way. La Quinta’s tagline is “Wake up on the bright side.” She woke up on the raging side.
“She comes down screaming, ‘My money’s been stolen, my money’s been stolen!’ ” Brooks says. “You could hear her before she even got to the lobby.”
At first the friends were baffled by the angry woman. She was hollering about unauthorized hotel charges on her card. When she found the lobby empty of all but the three friends, she immediately called La Quinta’s corporate office.
That’s when things started to get ridiculous. When the woman finally got a human on the line, the friends could hear the exchange. “They say, ‘OK, ma’am, we’re going to transfer you to someone who can help you,’ ” Dobani recalls. “Next thing I know, the phone on the desk starts ringing.”
That’s right, the phone on the unmanned desk. The reason the woman had to call corporate in the first place.
So Dobani did what seemed to him to be the logical thing: He answered the phone. When the unhappy woman realized she’d been handed off to another guest standing inches away, “she got even more mad,” says Dobani.
Soon, another phone line rang. Dobani answered that too. On the other end? Another angry guest, same problem. Then other angry/concerned/confused/bewildered guests began showing up in the lobby, saying they too had been alerted about withdrawals from their debit cards.
“It wasn’t just small amounts. We’re talking $100, $200,” says Brooks. “At one point there were at least 10 people coming down to the desk to complain. We’re calling the La Quinta corporate office and saying, ‘You’ve got a situation here; it could get really bad.’ ”
Decision time
Let’s take a second here. Put yourself in our trio’s shoes. You’re tired. You’re wired. You did everything right. You planned ahead, made your reservation, partied all night with your friends, and now you’re ready to crash.
But instead of a room key and a ticket to slumberland, you’ve got nothing. You’re standing in a lobby full of angry, venting guests who assume you work at the hotel. You’re way out near the airport. Outside there’s nothing but a parking lot and a Taco Bell. You’ve got no idea where to escape to find another room. So what do you do?
While some might have justifiably skedaddled into the night, leaving the other guests to tangle with La Quinta on their own, these three friends decided to stay put. After all, they had experience with angry customers. Dobani, Brooks and Howard all had spent years in the service industry: selling shoes, pouring drinks, managing staff. They’d worked together at a trampoline park and an adult mini-golf course wrangling kids and their parents at birthday parties, as well as drunks at many a happy hour. Walking away from an obvious problem was not in their DNA. As the woman hollered and others wondered where their money went, or how to return their rental car or where their breakfast was, something clicked: It was time to help.
“That’s what we’re used to,” Dobani says. “You see something that needs to get done, you step up and get it done.”
Thanks to his customer service background, Howard was familiar with the kinds of problems that can happen with online booking systems. The solution for the guests wasn’t to call La Quinta; it was to call their banks and stop the payments. So Howard urged the guests to contact their banks. Dobani and Brooks, still answering the phones behind the desk, followed his lead. He’d managed them before; they let him manage them again. It was a familiar situation.
“When people are pissed off, they just want to be told that it’s going to be OK, and that you’re going to help take care of it,” said Brooks. “They just want to be heard.”
But not everyone could be calmed down; that first angry woman who came down the elevator screaming had grown mad enough to call the police.
“I thought it could turn ugly when the cop walked in,” says Brooks. “The lady’s screaming. And I’m behind the desk in fishnet stockings, shorts and a T-shirt,” she adds.
But instead of arresting the friends for impersonating hotel staff, the officer gave the chaotic scene the once-over and decided that he didn’t want to get involved. Instead, reports the trio, he told them, “I’m just going to leave—you do what you gotta do,” and then left.
A makeshift hotel staff
By now it was clear that the three friends were the closest thing to staff that this hotel had, and the guests needed help. And it wasn’t just angry customers anymore. As the sun rose, the hotel’s early risers were starting to appear. They wanted to check out. They wanted shuttles to the airport. They wanted transport into the city.
Brooks rummaged through the empty office looking for a list of contacts for shuttle buses and taxis. (“Every office has a cheat sheet somewhere,” she says.) She eventually found it and handed the list to Dobani, who was manning the front desk with a smile plastered on his face. As the exchange took place, at around 6:30 a.m., a bunch of guys in construction gear stumbled downstairs and took their seats in the buffet area, patiently waiting for their coffee, bagels, waffles and eggs to appear. Not ones to disappoint, Brooks and Howard got to work. During her time casting around the office for the cheat sheet, Brooks had also found the keys to the cabinets where the food was stored.
Here, their experience came in handy yet again: Because Brooks and Howard had served food at the mini-golf course where they’d worked together, they’d both been certified in commercial food safety. They knew they couldn’t safely cook up scrambled eggs or bacon to satisfy government regulations of food safety. (One order of salmonella, coming up!) But anyone can lay out cereal, biscuits and individual yogurt cups.
Back at the desk, Dobani was calling shuttles and helping customers check out as fast as he could. “I’m telling people, ‘Yes, go ahead and leave your keys here on the desk,’ ” he says.
Customers rolled with it. They happily dug in to the breakfast buffet, apparently unbothered by the fact that they were getting served by a guy in a bright red Atlanta Braves jersey and a young woman in fishnet stockings. The friends acted like staff, and the guests treated them that way.
The three were still serving breakfast when the morning shift’s desk clerk finally showed up at 8 a.m. The clerk looked at them quizzically and asked, “What can I do for you guys?”
Brooks smiled and said, “Do you know what we just did for you?”
The end of a wild night
By this point, the friends had been up for 24 hours, and what had started as a lark had turned into a job as tiring as any other. When they saw an actual employee, they thought the adventure was finally over.
“We were flat-out exhausted,” says Brooks.
But the La Quinta hotel had one surprise left. The newly arrived clerk gave them a key card, and they joyfully headed for their long-awaited beds. But when they opened the door, they found a stark-naked woman stepping out of the shower. She let it be known that she was unhappy to see them.
Brooks, Howard and Dobani never did find out what had gone wrong with the booking system, but they did get a vague explanation about the empty desk: An employee had left “prematurely” without “notifying management” and was now “no longer with the hotel,” according to a statement by hotel officials.
The Wyndham company did eventually show its gratitude, giving the three free rewards points and “rewards boxes” that included fluffy bathrobes. And Brooks got a free meal out of it. When they met with the Wyndham boss, “I told him ‘I have to confess, I took some ravioli,’ ” she says. “He said, ‘You could’ve taken it all, and it’d be OK.’ ”
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Originally Published in Reader's Digest
