Are you checking out? Did you remember to pack your uranium?
I never fret about forgetting possessions in hotel rooms because, just before we leave, my wife morphs into a forensic investigator. She inspects the shower. She shines her phone flashlight around the closet. She strips the bed and peeks underneath. She checks the safe, even if we didn’t use it.
Then she swipes the toiletries and we split.
On Tuesday, Hotels.com released its annual “Innsights Report.” I’m a sucker for Lost & Found anecdotes of the strange kind. How do you check out of a hotel and forget your prosthetic leg? Wouldn’t you realize as you’re hopping toward the elevator? Or was it a spare leg?
How do you leave behind a pet lizard? Why are you travelling with a chickadee?
Items found by hotel staff this year included a Rolex, Birkin bag, rice cooker, car tire, blender, construction pipes, two leg casts and “enough dentures to fill a whole hotel.” This is in addition to the underwear, iPhone chargers and razors.
Hotel cleaners are basically anthropologists. They glimpse society.
But it’s not just hotels that trigger mass amnesia. Earlier this year, Uber released a list of items left in cars. These included: toupées, pet spiders, jar of oysters, ceramic cats, real turtles, a burrito steamer (?), garden gnomes, robots, a fake butt (?), panty liner laced with $1,000, paternity tests, Harry Potter wand, garden fence, Jeep Liberty engine, a Beyoncé fold-up fan and a breathalyzer, which is likely why Uber was requested in the first place.
Someone panicked after losing a candle emblazoned with “See You In Court.”
My verdict? A society in which people forget exotic possessions is a society with too many possessions. Nobody misplaced their powdered wig in the 17th century. But today, if you leave behind an $8.5-million watch in Room 1304, you clearly have too much stuff. Stop consuming.
Someone this year forgot to take a packed suitcase. How is that possible? Then an already overworked hotel staffer drove four hours to reunite the Samsonite with its owner.
So today, I salute everyone who toils in hospitality. Forget the forgetfulness of guests. These unsung heroes at the front desk and in the kitchens, the cleaning crews and concierge portals are forced to deal with entitled humans who are powered by raw demand for their stay.
In the Dominican Republic a few years ago, I witnessed another guest absolutely lose her mind because the pool towels were too “hard.” The forlorn hotel employee, eyes downcast, silently absorbed this hideous abuse as the guest unloaded an unhinged jeremiad, like the worker was personally responsible for the lack of on-site Bounce Fabric Softener.
Here are some demands catalogued by hotels around the world this year: “an Evian-filled bathtub so a child can bathe in the purest water,” “caviar hot dog,” “fresh goat milk” and “2 kg of bananas,” that last one possibly ordered by a potassium-deficient baller.
Working at a hotel must be more stressful than air traffic control. Everyone wants something and they want it right now. We are in the midst of the Toronto International Film Festival, which is like the Burning Man Super Bowl for local hotels. The demands are off the charts. Years ago, I wrote a column in which I called around to ask hotels for the special requests they got from the boldface.
Mickey Rourke asked for a birthday cake topped with real handcuffs. Pet massages, helicopter tours of Niagara, panda visits, sock steaming, oxygenating facials, four-foot safes, no request was unimaginable. After a celebrity forgot her matching stilettos, staff at the Ritz-Carlton did a colour analysis of her gown and spray-painted a different pair of shoes to match her red carpet getup. Staff at the Four Seasons custom-built a pink doggy staircase so a celebrity’s teacup chihuahua could climb into the luxurious bed.
Yes, room rates have spiked. Consumers have expectations. But this does not justify calling the lobby and asking the poor bastard on the midnight shift to send up an off-menu Wagyu steak to be prepared bedside by a troupe of Cirque du Soleil acrobats. Or to call the hotel post-departure to see if anyone stumbled upon your glass eye. Or to rant about towels.
We need to be kinder to everyone in the service sector.
And we need to do a better job keeping track of our stuff.
If you check into the Hilton with your pet goat, don’t leave him there. That’s not forgetfulness — it’s livestock abandonment. You travelled to get a Wayne Gretzky rookie card appraised and then left it on the desk in your hotel room? That’s on you. Do not forget your watch on a hutch if you are likely to forget that you own a watch worth millions. It all signals a bigger problem.
Hotels are turning into weird black holes because we have too much stuff.
