Hilton Guest Wakes Up To Manager Sucking His Toes

You have way too much opinion here Ben. You should have interviewed a hotel manager. I’m no longer one anymore due to not wanting to deal with the general public after Covid and stubborn franchise owners anymore but I’ll give some observations here based actual industry experience:

So first off with keys, the night manager should have been using an assigned master key to enter a room regardless of the reason. Master keys are either assigned to a specific individual or they’re a number that’s signed in and out during shift, depends on the ownership and sometimes key system on how this works but regardless of ownership key system, etc, the only situations where we make a key to a specific guest room is at checkin for a guest, if the guest gets locked out and they need a new key, or if there’s a billing issue that we need to lock the guest out to generate a trip to the front desk. No one should EVER be making single guest keys to enter a room as it makes tracking who it was a complete mess (but doable since we can cross reference a key make report with the door lock audit).

If a team member in my employ was accused of this, guilty or not I would probably have had to term them due to the sketchy behavior with the key cards.

You’re right in saying guests should use the electronic deadbolt as soon as they enter a room. This is not only a physical deadbolt, but it also has an electronic relay inside it that prohibits ANY key other than emergency keys from opening the door which I’ll talk about in a second. Another commenter mentioned that the older style u-bolt latches and the newer swinging L shape latches are easily opened, well yes, they are, but the average hotel employee does not know how to open them and if they do, they make A TON of noise doing so to the point where you will wake up and be able to call 911 if not prevent them from getting in the room.

Moving onto emergency keys, hotels violate their general liability insurance if they don’t protect those. I was a GM of a 100 room limited service Hilton franchise hotel with about 75% occupancy year round. I had an EKey, out front office supervisor/manager had an EKey, our engineering manager had an EKey, the fire department had ten EKey in their Knox box, and then I had a final EKey in an emergency box that involved breaking glass for the front desk in the event of a serious emergency. Those of us with assigned ones NEVER used those for gaining access to a room, we had to use our masters. The EKey were in our wallets so to speak. I once saw our maintenance manager using his to open doors on an audit report, he received a final written warning for breaking the policy as it’s so important.

The sex comment you made honestly hurt me as a former hotel worker and I think you owe the industry as a whole an apology. There are sex crazed lunatics across all industries and not just hotels. A saw another commenter mention they were sexually harassed by guests and I can honestly say in my experience I dealt with drunken males on business saying things to our female employees that crossed the line and sometimes even to the point of touching. Fifteen years of experience, I think I had maybe five instances of suspicious behavior between employees and guests in a possible relationship and at that only one that went as far as an actual relationship. Again, you owe all the hardworking hotel team members that bend over backwards to serve you an apology for implying that we are all sex crazed lunatics.

I’m guessing the toe sucking employee is no longer employed at that location, accusation aside it sounds like he had zero reason to be in the room at that time. To enter a room due to smoke there had to be a burning smell and at that multiple calls to the room first before making entry overnight. From there he made a guest room key to gain access which is never acceptable. I’ve had to make entry into unresponsive rooms for a variety of reasons in my career including one where water was pouring into the room below, I get in and find a guy who got so drunk he slammed his head falling out of the shower was unconscious. I’ve had another case where a family member called about a guest missing their flight and not being able to get a hold of them and finding the guest passed away. Use some common sense when labeling an industry the way you did.