Receptionist serves sassy response after customer demands 4th-floor room at 3-floor hotel

Front desk executives are trained in more than just grooming, etiquette, and bookkeeping—they're also skilled in handling difficult customers. While many complaints are routine, some can be so intense that they leave the staff emotionally drained. In June 2021, a Reddit user posted in the r/MaliciousCompliance group about a particularly entitled customer. The guest insisted she had a reservation on a floor that didn’t exist and demanded to be taken there.

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“Customer had a reservation for the 4th floor at a 3-floor hotel so I took her to the roof,” the hotel employee wrote in the caption of the now-deleted Reddit post, per Bored Panda. Below the caption, they unrolled the entire story. At that time, the writer of the post was working as a front-desk executive in a hotel. The hotel had three floors and was previously named “Days Inn.” They revealed that the only way to book a reservation was to talk to the front desk staff. “No online reservations; no third-party reservations. About 50% of our rooms were sold to walk-ins,” they wrote.

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On one weekend, the hotel was fully booked by guests. An elevator was showing some trouble, so the staff shut it down and called for a repairman. It was 10 p.m. and the receptionist wasn’t expecting anyone until the next morning. That night, all the expected guests were already checked in and accessibility rooms were located on the same floor as the lobby. So the employee was relaxed thinking that in case a guest needed help with their luggage, they would help them manually.

Representative Image Source: Pexels | Mikhail Nilov

Then all of a sudden, a woman walked into the hotel. “I don’t recognize [her] from the check-ins. She plops a paper in front of me and then goes and gets lots of luggage,” the Reddit user recalled. The paper showed the woman’s reservation at Days Inn at their address for the same night for a tenth of the price they had been selling their rooms before getting fully booked. The employee told the woman, “I regret to inform you that we do not accept third-party reservations, and we are unfortunately already booked for the night,” but the woman demanded her reservation be fulfilled, “I have a reservation. It’s right there. I paid good money for it.”

Representative Image Source: Pexels | Mikhail Nilov

“Ma’am, I believe you, however, unfortunately, you are not in our system because we don’t take third-party reservations. They sold it to you fraudulently,” the employee said. Instead of understanding, the woman became aggressive and yelled, “You’re just trying to steal my money! I have a confirmation number right there. I handed it to you!”

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The executive tried to explain that although the reservation slip showed the hotel as 'Days Inn,' their hotel name had changed long ago, gesturing to a sign board nearby. They also said that the reservation slip mentioned a reservation for a “fourth-floor room” while the hotel building had only three floors. But then the woman said something shocking, “I stayed at this Days Inn last year on the fourth floor!”

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While the argument continued, the employee remained calm and responded politely, but then the woman screamed, almost to the point of ordering them that she be taken to the fourth floor, immediately. “I don’t respond, I just stare at her with a blank face until she slaps the desk and screams ‘Now!’” Fed up with the rude behavior, the employee picked up their huge keys ring, loaded themselves with the woman’s luggage, and both of them started climbing the staircase.

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Once they arrived at the third floor, the employee intelligently gestured the woman to a sign that said the floor’s number. They then used a maintenance key to unlock a door to the maintenance stairs where there were no lights. The woman kept on trudging after the employee, not saying anything. The receptionist opened the door to the hotel’s tarred roof and walked outside, giving the most perfect response, “And here is the fourth floor. I hope it is as nice as the last time you stayed here.” They then dropped the woman’s luggage and ran back down the stairs to the front desk.

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Concluding the post, the Redditor expressed that if the woman had been slightly politer, they would have helped her get a room at another hotel, but owing to her rude behavior, they just abandoned her luggage on the roof, not caring what went on with her. When the employee went back up there for a midnight round, the woman wasn’t there any longer. So, they locked up the door and wondered that she must have left via a different exit.

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The post scored 10,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments. u/johnstern42 commented, “This is GOLD!” Whereas, some other Redditor users thought it was an episode from the "Fawlty Towers," referring to the fictional hotel in the British sitcom. People showered huge support to the receptionist saying that they did the best thing they could do. u/a-rovinlgo lauded them saying, “Bravo! There is no way I could have handled that situation without completely losing my cool - my hat is off to you.”

Image Source: Reddit | u/thoughtfulspiky

Others sympathized with the woman who had been deceived by a third-party booking retailer. Talking about third-party hotel reservations, u/eboom011 suggested, “This is the exact reason I don’t book on 3rd party websites. I may use their site to see what options are in the area and filter by different amenities, but once I’ve made my choice, I will always go to that hotel's website or call directly to book. This was shitty for all involved.”

This article originally appeared last year.