A Small Selection of My Strangest Hotel Experiences
In the run up to the publication of No Vacancy -a micro fiction collection chiefly concerned with strange things which have happened to me whilst staying in hotels- I’ve found my thoughts frequently straying towards all the strange things which have happened to me whilst staying in hotels.
Some of the tiny stories in the collection are real, if somewhat absurd, recollections of actual incidents and experiences. Other are more fantastical. Holed up, alone in a strange city, I let my imagination romp all over the show. There is, however, a reasonably fine line between the mad hotel stuff that really happened and the mad hotel stuff I’ve made up.
I am well known -infamous you might say- for my travel misadventures. Though they’re less funny in the moment, they do make for great story material/dinner party anecdotes/cautionary tales for fellow travellers. Here, for the curious amongst you, is a top twelve list of the worst and weirdest things which have ever happened to me in hotels. I intended to stop at ten, but I kept remembering more harrowing moments from my hotel life.
Please read and enjoy. You may feel sympathetic, (I’m quite an unfortunate adventurer) or perhaps smug, (you’re probably not as unfortunate as me), then go out and buy No Vacancy from a reputable bookseller, (ideally No Alibis). There are plenty more misadventures contained therein.
1. The time, hampered by an early arrival and late check-in, I found myself offering Ruby Wax the spare bed in my Indian hotel room so she could have a much-needed nap.
2. The time I arrived at my hotel in Freiburg only to find there were multiple Freiburgs in Germany and I was booked into a Freiburgh hotel three hundred kilometres away.
3. The time a hotelier in Cork, who’d clearly double-booked my actual room, gave me a key to a room in the attic which obviously belonged to his teenage son.
4. The time I was mistakenly booked to speak at a memorial service in rural Italy and ended up trapped in a tiny hotel in the arse end of nowhere with the British cycling team.
5. The time I got locked out of a motel in Trenton in the middle of the night and was rescued by a squad of Hispanic nuns each clutching a single pillow in a crisp white pillow case.
6. The time I was marooned in a casino hotel in the Dominican Republic for five days, sustaining myself on the breakfast buffet, too scared to leave for a group of men with guns, followed me every time I stepped outside.
7. The time I accidentally booked in to one of America’s most haunted hotels and felt like something was trying to drag me under whilst swimming laps of the 7th floor pool.
8. The time I stayed in a hotel with a disability access bathroom bigger than the bedroom itself. So large was this bathroom, someone had placed a coffee table, rug and dried flower arrangement in the midst of it to take the empty look off the place.
9. The time I stayed in an enormous hotel in Castlebar and was the only resident for three straight nights. I was attended by a solitary employee who ran the reception desk, restaurant, bar and gym and cut my own path through the pitch dark each time I left my room, triggering the motion-sensitive lights.
10. The time I stayed in the super high-tech Dublin hotel where everything from the curtains to the air conditioning was operated by Ipad. I couldn’t figure out how to switch off the big lights and had to ask a receptionist to come up and turn them off for me. Then I accidentally turned everything on again and was too embarrassed to ask for help a second time, so I slept with the TV on and all the lights, and a pillow clamped over my head.
11. The time I got into the lift floor of a Scottish hotel and it dropped five floors immediately, with door wide open so I could see each landing speeding past and felt certain this was how I was going to die. (I did not die, but thereafter I took the stairs every time I returned to my room).
12. The time I was mistaken for a dentist attending the dental conference in the hotel’s conference room and duly equipped with a tote bag, water bottle and conference pack. (See also the time I was the only resident in a Welsh hotel who was not a German civil engineer).
You can pre-order/order No Vacancy from No Alibis Press via this link