Once again, guests strike again! Completely oblivious that they are at fault and of course it's the hotel's fault for their stupidity. 

So this gentleman stayed with us for a couple of nights and on his first night he decides to take a bath. He puts the water on and decides to take a nap ..... a few hours later, we get a complaint from the room downstairs that a "waterfall" is coming from the ceiling. We quickly send housekeeping and maintenance to have a look both to that room and the one above.

They notice from the room above that there was water all the way out in the corridor so they start ringing the doorbell. The guest inside abruptly opens the door and allows the staff members to enter the room. The reception team quickly organise a room move for the "gentleman" and staff commence to remove the water from the room.

After removing over 120 litres of water from the carpet which is approximately one entire bathtub, staff do an assessment of the damage done to the room and OF COURSE that will be charged back to the guest.

Management tried contacting the guest a few times and also sent a few letters to the room informing the guest that there will be a charge for the damage. The guest was a Lastminute.com guest so there was a bit of fear that he would just run-off without any method of payment. Since the gentleman was ignoring the calls and letters, management decided to charge the guest a small damage fee until senior management could determine if further charges needed to be done.

Then the guest reacted! When he saw the notification from his bank that he had been charged. He calls angrily from his room arguing why he was charged for a little bit of water in his room. The guest didn't even allow the manager put in a word and immediately gave the usual speech about how he has travelled around the world, and this has never happend. That this was not a 5 star hotel if there was no mechanism in place to stop this. Blah blah blah and hung up.

Whilst I do agree that in some hotels in the world, especially in Japan, their is an automated mechanism to stop the water flow after the bathtub fills .... this is not generally the case in the UK. We assume that being in a 5 star property, people have common sense, but we cannot make everything in the hotel stupid proof,