If you're a receptionist please share your stories about entitled/disrespectful/rude customer behaviour with me!

[Lollipopping]

I work as a receptionist in a hotel. It's not a 5 star or super luxurious hotel but it's a really lovely place to stay and I really love my job.

However, behaviour from some (a minority! most are lovely!) guests seems to get more entitled and rude by the day. I think some guests think that we're not receptionists but are actually their personal assistant and dogsbody during their stay, whilst also simultaneously looking down their noses at us and thinking we're beneath them, therefore not listening to a word we say when we check them in or answer any of their questions. In the last few days alone I've had guests who:

Got angry with me because their taxi (that they booked themselves!) was late and tried to demand that we got a staff member to drive them to their destination.

Several guests just haven't bothered to listen at all to me during check in when I've explained where their room is or where the restaurant or pool is, and have just either started talking to their partner or friend, and a couple have answered their phones and started chatting and just expected me to stand there and wait whilst other customers waited behind them too, whilst they had a conversation. Some then get stroppy when they can't find their room as they didn't listen to my directions.

Someone else checked in, and within their first two hours of being on the premises had approached reception at least 10 times asking questions about the area and asking us to do things such as try to book them some tickets at the local theatre and did we have any hair straighteners for their wife to use. We're not concierges, nor does the hotel advertise having a concierge service. They seemed to think we were a PA service for them and would just start talking to us and making their demands even when we were dealing with other customers.

I could go on and on about various other instances but these are just the recent ones from the last few days!

I worked in a hotel in London about 20 years ago and this woman rocked up with her friend in tow and it transpired they'd followed her husband and bit on the side to London and had a copy of the booking on email and tried to book in with the email then she had this huge meltdown and started shouting about us "allowing" this type of thing to go on and literally screaming in front of other guests and then punched a glass panel in the door smashing it!!

I explained I was sorry about her situation but as a hotel chain it wasn't illegal to book 2 guests in whatever their marital status and it wasn't our place to question that

We had a huge glass vase on the reception desk that a local florist filled every week and she picked it up to launch at me thankfully security were right behind her at this point and stopped her and we called the police it was scary she was going mental her friend looked mortified

I mean I understood her being upset but what she thought I could do about her cheating husband was beyond me, She was so rude when the security chap came and police were there to arrest her she came out the security office I said in a very loud voice "I honestly had no idea, I mean they've been quite afew times haven't they you just never know" the look on her face was priceless but he had been to us at least 10-15 times "on business" but I wanted her to know her behaviour was unacceptable and also it wasn't the first time he'd been she needed to know that.

My manager said to me "good on you I'd have done the same"

Totally mental

I have never had a receptionist job but today, my workplace was understaffed and I did an overtime shift where I covered the receptionist for an hour or so. Yeah the public can be ridiculous.

all I had to do was check people in for appointments but there was a bunch of unhooked people walking in and randomly asking me to do things like write a letter for someone’s solicitor (this isn’t related to our business) or give directions or help them do some random time consuming task etc.

Unhooked should be unbooked haha

Hahaha unhooked sounds definitely suitable to describe the behaviour of some guests!

We get guests asking us to do totally random time consuming tasks too; once a woman was going to ball and asked at reception if one of us would sew the hem of her dress up a bit like we were some sort of seamstress service. She had a husband with her and numerous friends and their husbands that were attending the ball with them so she could have asked any of them.

I don't work in a hotel but I was stood in a very long queue of people waiting to check out this morning when a woman came down, took one look at the queue and marched to the front to talk to the receptionist. As if we were all invisible! Some people are just arseholes

Not reception but I used to work in the catering dept of a largeish local theatre. I'd get put in various places each shift, bar, cafe counter, serving food, kp type duties etc. The worst was the sweets counter which was a tiny little counter the opposite end of the foyer to the bar and cafe, you had to stand there by yourself bored silly because hardly anyone bought sweets due to the astronomical theatre prices and all your colleagues were of course up the other end.

So many people would approach me asking for a glass of tap water. There was no sink. It was very clear there was no sink, the counter only came up to my waist, no sink behind me and clearly too small to house one underneath it. Many many accusations of trying to rip them off when I directed them to the bar even when I explained I had no way of giving them a tap water and my colleagues at the bar would be more than happy to give them a free glass of tap water-somehow this didn't compute.

The 'best' one though was when a couple approached me and the woman asked me where the stairs were. In order to get to me they would have had to walk through the main doors which faced the enormous stairs and then turn 90 degrees to talk to me. So I, very politely, told her that they were just behind her and pointed them out. They both turned and her husband/partner laughed and shrugged at me like 'how could we have missed that'. She however didn't take the embarrassment too well. She absolutely let rip at me, ranting raving and screaming at me that she'd never been to this theatre before, she didn't know where the stairs were, how could she be expected to know, I was such a smug bitch for 'pointing in such a sarcastic way', she ought to 'slap the smug out of me' etc etc. Her DH stood there gawping at her, 18 year old me just stood there not really knowing how to defuse this and eventually the duty manager clocked what was going on and managed to intervene but bloody hell. Never saw such a tantrum over stairs until about 14 years later when I had toddlers!

I wasn't the receptionist in this scenario but I was picking up a hire car with a rent yesterday and a woman rushed ahead of us. Like, specifically saw us there and almost broke into a run to make sure she got to the counter first. She gave her name and whatever and then said she needed to go to the toilet. She was literally about ten minutes, possibly even longer, while we waited and waited. We could have picked up our own keys in all that time and been on our way. After five minutes, I asked if we could please be attended to because the woman was taking ages and it was very unfair to make us wait. The receptionist said it was policy that she had to continue with that woman's check in before she could help us. It felt like an actual eternity. Zero apology from the woman when she came back. I would have been so flustered, mortified and apologetic but no....she seemed to think she was the Queen of Sheba and us mere mortals could just wait.

What a selfish, entitled cunt. Why do people do this? It wouldn't even enter my head to consider keeping people waiting that long to save myself some time.