We checked into a hotel last month and plodded through the tedious check-in procedure in a daze. It was a Millennium Hotel, but I won’t say in what city.
I liked our room right away because it had an open window. Then I thought: isn’t it strange that the window is already open? And the tv was on and tuned to CNN—also unusual. It wasn’t until all our bags were settled in that I noticed a man’s jacket sprawled on a chair. The room was already occupied.
I tried calling the front desk, but in ten minutes of trying, they never picked up the phone. Then I noticed that the room number printed on the phone didn’t match the number of the room I was in. Sloppy.
Bob took the elevator down to the lobby, leaving me alone in the room to face the jacket-man when he returned, or emerged from under the bed. We changed rooms without incident—just inconvenience.
I wonder now how many times other people have entered our various hotel rooms while we’ve been out. It happened once while we were in—in bed. It was in Paris. Two men entered our room in the dead of night. Luckily, we woke up and Bob dramatically commanded them to get out. “Pardon,” they said, “c’est une erreur,” it is a mistake. The strange thing was that they had been standing there whispering for a moment. If it had truly been a mistake, wouldn’t they immediately back out of an occupied room?
How are hotel rooms assigned to multiple parties? The most basic computer system shouldn’t allow it.
