Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were.

Guest Stories Vol. 5

We met a lot of guests in our more than 5 years owning and living at our Costa Rican hotel. When people find out that we owned a small, boutique hotel, they are curious to know what some of the strangest guest stories are. They want the nitty gritty, the inside scoop.

Hospitality is making your guests feel at home. This is especially true when you have a very small, boutique property in the remote jungle of Costa Rica! You want good reviews, good word of mouth, and return visits.

Linked at the end of this post are some guest stories I’ve already shared. Today’s quips still make me laugh at the things people do.

We did always strive to make our guests feel at home, but oh how I wished some of these guests were!

Guests who don’t know their own dietary preferences:

When a guest arrived, we would ask for their dietary preferences and any allergies. Make them feel at home and provide food that fits their needs. But when they’re also confused, it makes meal planning pretty tough. Here are some examples!

• “We are pescatarian (no red meat or poultry, but we do eat chicken.)” (Uh, just to be clear, pescatarian means you only eat fish!? And did you know chicken is poultry?)

• “All vegans; but will eat cheese and fish.” (Um, the definition of vegan is someone who doesn’t eat any animal products. Cheese and fish? Animal derived! Maybe they were the pescatarians!)

Guests who have a particular food regimen:

In our hotel as part of your stay, we offered free breakfast daily for each guest. Not a buffet but a real, sit-down lots of yummy choices breakfast. At first, we made a mistake not clarifying that it was 1 breakfast per person per day and that certain ‘extras’ would be an additional charge. We learned our lesson with these guests! To say we needed to quickly make emergency grocery orders during their stays was not an understatement!

• A woman who every morning would not choose a menu option but asked for maracuyá (passion fruit) for breakfast. Not just 1—she wanted 10 each morning! If you’ve never had passion fruit, see picture below. It’s a scoop full of goop. I couldn’t get over the thought of her stomach full of goop every morning, not to mention what her bathroom breaks were like!

Yellow Passion Fruit and its goopy insides!

• One couple was clearly on a protein heavy diet. Every morning they’d order the typical Costa Rican breakfast that included 2 eggs but then asked for a dozen more - each! These two guests were also very skinny – maybe they were on to something – the 14-egg breakfast diet!

Guests who don’t like nature or animals:

Costa Rica is famous for its wildlife and “naturaleza”. It’s one of the main reasons people travel there. Whenever we’d find a cool animal near the hotel’s common spaces, we’d tell the guests so they would be able to see it. Many times, we’d have monkeys, a toucan or a sloth nearby. We were located in a rainforest, and most of our units had screens or open-air bathrooms so guests could enjoy the maximum effect of the outdoors. Not all of them enjoyed it.

• A guest celebrating her birthday was finishing breakfast, and I told her that our gardener had just found a sloth that was nearby and asked if she wanted to go see it. All the other guests were jumping up to see it, but she told me, “No thanks, I don’t like animals.” Um ok, I mean it’s a sloth and you’ve traveled to a rainforest with cool animals but ok.

• To another guest, I pointed out a sloth who was chewing on some leaves. The guest asked me, “Do they always move that slow?” Um, yep, it’s a SLOTH!

• One guest insisted that for their visit they wanted to stay in a treehouse because they wanted the FULL rainforest experience with an open-air bathroom. Cool, right? Yes, but she failed to read our website or heed my advice that there might be insects in the rainforest! Her first night at the hotel, she came running from her Treehouse in a panic screaming that there was a moth in her shower, and she ‘couldn’t possibly stay in a room with a moth in the shower’. Full rainforest experience over! Luckily, we had another room available, and they moved rooms- no moths this time.

Guests who bring (and leave) strange items:

People like their comforts of home. I get that. Some people travel with their own pillow, or apparently also the following…

• Our hotel didn’t have TVs. It didn’t when we bought the hotel, and we chose to keep it that way. But when a honeymoon guest asked me before their visit if we had TVs and I said, no, they asked if they could ‘bring a projector’ and if we ‘could put up a screen’ so they could stream TV or movies in their room. We would do almost anything for a guest! (link)– so we tacked up a white sheet on a wall so they could ‘project’ whatever the heck they were watching! None of my business, but can’t you think of something else to do on your honeymoon besides watch TV?

• One couple didn’t want to eat in our restaurant but wanted all their meals to be delivered to their room. Not IN the room, TO the room and just left outside the door with a text notifying them that it was there. They left the room once during their stay and asked for a few new bath towels. When the housekeepers went to the room, they discovered the entire bedroom was full of video equipment- cameras, lights, etc. I guess you can use your own imagination but suffice it to say I never found any porn videos that seemed to be filmed at our hotel, but I didn’t really look!

• After a couple left, we found that they had left behind their own king-size mattress pad! That must have taken up a whole suitcase!

Mark with the king-sized mattress pad a guest left behind!

• We got a lot of honeymooners. After one very young honeymoon couple left, the housekeepers found on the nightstand (not in the wastebasket!), an empty box of condoms. Not just 1 or 2 wrappers. It was an empty box of 50 (for a 7 night stay!) You can do the math…

• One guest asked if our housekeepers could be careful not to touch ANYTHING they found in her room, even if it seemed unusual. Of course, as soon as she left for a tour, the housekeepers rushed to her room to see what could have been ‘so unusual’. She had assembled a huge collection of dead bugs that she had been collecting from the surrounding forest, and they were all laid out like a museum collection on the table in her room. The day after she left, we heard that a woman had been detained at the airport trying to leave Costa Rica with a large quantity of insects! We never heard what happened to her.

Guests with odd beverage choices:

Many guests would perhaps imbibe more while they were on vacation than while at home, but we’ll never know. Some had interesting habits around drinking.

• A guest named Jack loved sitting at the bar and drinking a special martini. He liked a straight-up ‘martini’ made with tequila. It was just a martini glass filled with chilled tequila. He ordered so many, that we began referring to him as Tequini Jack. Several nights, our staff had to carry him back to his room.

• A Russian guest told Mark that Guinness is a breakfast beer, and each morning he would be at the bar when staff arrived (6:30am!) to get his breakfast beer. He paired it with a Cuban cigar. Normally our property was non-smoking, but we let this guest enjoy his cigar with his Guinness every morning because you know, make ‘em feel at home, but it drove me crazy and I wished he was back home! He also asked Mark why we didn’t have Hennessy Cognac at our bar. Before Mark could answer, he said “I’ll tell you why you don’t have Hennessy – it’s because only Blacks and Russians drink it!” Mark drove into town later that day and bought a bottle of Hennessy specifically for this guest. He never had a sip of it, and it sat on the bar untouched for months. I hope he has a bottle in his own home!

I know for certain that we made these guests feel at home as a few of them returned for another visit. And now that we knew what they liked, we anticipated and made them feel more at home - even though I wished they were.

Have You Heard the One About the Two Iranian Doctors?

People Are Strange

---

Thanks for reading! Please like or share this post as it helps others find it!

Do you bring your own ‘comforts of home’ on vacation? Do you let-it-all-loose when on vacation? Do you travel to a place because of its nature/wildlife?