Five-Star Hotel Guest Leaves Without Paying After 603-Night Stay

https://archive.md/jcs6x Archive for the paywall. It’s a short article: checked in for one night, stayed for 603 nights, leaving in Jan 2021 (so they arrived around April 2019, meaning this could potentially be related to Covid, although that is not discussed in the article). The total bill is stated to be around 71,000 US dollars. The hotel has (naturally) filed a complaint against the guest, but more interestingly it has also filed complaints against the front desk manager and several staff who are accused of forging, deleting, adding, and falsifying a large number of entries in the guest’s account.

I work as a receptionist at a medium-size hotel so I can give some industry insight here. The guest purportedly had the reservations manager and staff on his side, so it’s not surprising that he could get away with this - you might think there would be checks and balances in place to ensure a stupendous bill like this doesn’t get racked up without guarantee of payment, but to the extent that those checks exist (rarer than you might expect, but still fairly common) the staff are the people who enforce those checks, and the reservation manager is the oversight to ensure those checks are being enforced.

The part about falsifying records is probably fluff; extending a person’s stay necessarily involves altering records in a guest’s account. These alterations are routine and would be present even in accounts of guests who extended their stay and then paid in full - they only became unethical alterations retroactively when the guest didn’t pay. If they were falsifying payment records to make it look like the account was paid, that’s a different matter, but that seems unlikely as that would have been caught on reconciliation by their accounts department. That said, I think the hotel should probably also file a complaint against their accounts person, who should have noticed this climbing bill after a month, or at the very least after a year.

This kind of phenomenon, on a smaller scale, is the main reason many hotels take pre-payment for stays. Paying on checkout is a fragile system - even if you take the guest’s payment details ahead of time, that’s no guarantee the bill amount will be available on the card to be charged.

That’s a rate of $3650/mo. Still cheaper than my rent even if they paid.

Paywall