Bedbugs, re-used towels, and the guest who BOILED to death in a jacuzzi: Hotel workers reveal their shocking secrets

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Drugs, dead bodies and dirty sheets - all things that might well have inhabited your hotel room in the days or even hours before you checked in.

That's according to hotel workers who have taken to online forum Quora to share their experiences of working in the hospitality industry. 

And with input from staff at hotels around the world, ranging from the cheapest to the most luxurious, two frequent revelations stood out - that your room is likely not nearly as clean as you think, and that deaths are a common occurrence.

Hotel staff have taken to online forum Quora to share their experiences of working in the hospitality industry - and you might want to start being wary of your towels (stock image)

One worker by the name of Farhad, who says he has worked in 'almost in every kind of a hotel', offered three insights for the thread: 'We can hear you having sex. Yes we do. Even if your TV volume is at max we can hear.

'The room I'm giving you is the same room in which a guy was found dead a few days before. And while checking in with your girlfriend, if you ask me to say “I don't know” when your wife asks me where you are, what you don't know is that your wife asked me the exact same thing last weekend!'

Several employees remarked that for them, dead bodies were a surprisingly common discovery, but that hotels do a good job of keeping this under wraps - particularly to ward off 'dark tourism groupies'.

Susan wrote of an incident which occurred around 2009, at a hotel which boasted jacuzzi suites: 'A woman had too much to drink, slipped into her Jacuzzi, and literally boiled to death.'

Marco, who worked at a major hotel in Las Vegas for eight years, commented: 'Deaths - where I worked, there were many. Overdoses were the most common. Not far behind were suicides. 

'Obviously, accidents happened as well. The real kicker in all of these situations is that they never made the news.'

One worked warned hotelgoers:  'We can hear you having sex. Yes we do. Even if your TV volume is at max we can hear,' (stock image)

Undoubtedly the saddest story came from the receptionist at a five-star hotel chain in Mexico City, about a 'nice elderly couple' that checked in one evening.

'The staff was intrigued because the couple seemed to be poor. The couple then went to the restaurant and asked for wine and some of the very finest items on the menu. By now the staff assumed they were celebrating something. 

The writer added: 'The next night they were found dead on their bed, they had committed suicide by OD together and left a note thanking the staff for the good service and apologising to the cleaning lady for having to clean up the mess, saying that wanted to save their family from the pain of finding them and cleaning up.'

Another recurring theme was the questionable cleaning practices witnessed from behind the scenes.

One wrote: 'Towels I am giving to you are used and not clean. Yes, they might smell nice, but it’s just an air freshener which I have sprayed over the towel after ironing it.'

This writer added that the 'excellent' online reviews at the hotel in question were written by employees themselves. 

Another, Peri, revealed: 'I have watched maids wipe all surfaces with the same disgusting cloth from sink to kitchenettes [and] toilets. 

'Dresser drawers are not on the maid's cleaning list, so if a traveller threw dirty underwear in a drawer all week you will be contaminating your clothing. TV remotes have more germs than many toilet exteriors. Toilets get at least a cursory wipe while remotes do not.'

One hotel worker said he'd often dealt with guests who had accidentally locked themselves in the corridors naked and had to go to reception, red-faced, to get a new key card (stock image)

This staffer was also one of several to mention bedbugs, and suggested: 'Check for bed bugs yourself while leaving your luggage on a hard surface just inside the room if you can.

'Untuck the bedding from the corners and lift it all away down to the mattress then [..] peer at the seams. You can sometimes see little blood stains from bed bugs biting previous guests as well.'

Leanne, a chambermaid at a London hotel in the mid 90's, confessed: 'We were told to wash all the crockery in the room in the sink (before the sink was cleaned) then dry it off using one of the used hand or bath towels from the room.'

It was unanimously revealed that the blankets on top of the sheets were seldom, if ever, washed, and neither were throw pillows - which are typically just chucked on the floor and replaced after the sheets have been changed. 

One commenter remarked: 'There is no purpose for throw pillows in a hotel other than moving dirt and grime from the floor onto my pillow.'

Another, who worked in a cheap motel, wrote: 'You seriously never ever want to use dishes anyone leaves in your room. They get washed with hotel soap over dish detergent, and I've found drug residue on a lot of spoons.'

Finally, the horror of the mattresses, which are often 'flipped' to conceal stains before eventually being disposed of.

'We have to throw out so many mattresses a year it'll spin your head,' one hotel manager wrote. 

'Gallons of spilt wine, excess bodily fluids, s**t beds. People are horrible animals, and we are their nest for the stay.'

Affairs are, unsurprisingly, a frequent and very obvious sight to behold.

'Yes, we host gentlemen and ladies who are having affairs,' one commented. 'Yes, we know who you are. No, we don't really care!' 

In one instance, an innkeeper at a small hotel in Vermont learned the hard way never to call a guest and inform them that they'd left an item behind after checkout. 

'We never knew when Mrs Smith was going to answer the phone and tell us that Mr Smith wasn't at a quaint Vermont inn last weekend, he was at a dentist convention in Toledo,' she wrote. 'Whoops.' 

One writer said that the 'excellent' online reviews at the hotel in question were written by employees themselves (stock image)

A somewhat amusing revelation came from one former hotel duty manager, who wrote: 'The one thing never stopped to surprise me is the amount of drunk people walking out of their bedrooms thinking that they opened their toilet doors - instead they opened the main door.'

He described several embarrassing occurrences in which naked guests locked themselves out of their rooms and were forced to creep all the way to the front desk for a new key.

Out of all the hairy encounters described, a fair bit of sound advice was shared, at least.

The best day to arrive at most hotels, for example, is a Sunday early in the month; after holidaymakers have left and before business travellers arrive. 

Booking through a third party website is never a good idea. You are unlikely to get the best choice of room, and you'll be the first to be turned away in the event of overbooking.

Ask for a corner room, they are usually more spacious. 

And last but not least, tipping goes a long, long way.