Hotel staff removed my belongings whilst I wasn't there

[Tothemoonandbackx]

I didn't really know where to put this, so property seemed like the only place that seemed sort of, relevant. My partner has been working away and he's been stopping in Hotels. He's stopped in this certain hotel before and never had a problem. The other night, he had a disagreement with a staff member, nothing audacious. Just a bit of a mix up with the manager telling my partner he could do one thing, and the staff member saying he couldn't. So he goes to work the following morning and everything seems OK, he comes back to find the staff have gone into his room and packed all his belongings into his travel bag and suitcase and removed them from the room. Is this legal??????? And if it is or isn't, is there any specific law or site I can get this information from???? I've googled a thousand things and nothings really coming up on the legality of it all.

@BoredZelda

What is there to be done with a duvet though? You move it out of the way when you get up and you put it over yourself when you get back in (or earlier).

Do you really not know how (or why) to make a bed?

Well I manage to make my bed by putting the part of the duvet that I moved out of the way to get up back on the bed. I can assure you my bed is made (when I want it to be, I let the mattress air quite often).

When we had old fashioned sheets and blankets it was a bigger job, but now?

OP mentioned fluffing pillows and putting a chocolate on the pillow. Cheaper places don't give you the chocolate anyway... Don't get it.

@BoredZelda

But probably most often when guests left at the end of their stay without taking the DND down, which means a cleaner on a very tight turnaround needs to get in there to clean because that room has a new guest in that day -- checkout time was 11 am, and check-in was at 3 pm, and I would usually have 10 or 11 rooms to clean, which didn't leave much wiggle room

Every single hotel I worked in had a system where housekeeping staff were given a list of which rooms had (or were going to be) checked out on that day. If a DND was on the door past check out and the room was a turnover, you went in. But you didn’t, under any circumstances, knock in the door of a DND which was a stay.

Absolutely, you had to start knocking on the checkouts at the time by which they should have checked out, but often self checkouts weren’t logged on the system by any method that got through to us promptly, and sometimes the guests had in fact left at 8 am, but left the DND up, which was a big waste of housekeeping time if you had a lot of checkouts to clean before check-in started.

We would never normally knock on a stay, but as I said, the head of housekeeping would do a welfare check after a certain period of time if the DND had been up uninterruptedly. I think they’d had a death that hadn’t been discovered promptly a year or two earlier.

If it is as you say then it seems an extreme reaction. I would question whether they wanted the room for another booking / were overbooked

To pack up a guest's items in their absence, and effectively discontinue that guest's stay there, is a really harsh treatment, and it just doesn't add up that they would do something so extreme for such a minor incident. Either the other member of staff is reporting it as a bigger deal than it was, or your husband is playing it down.

I assume he'd been an exemplary guest prior to this incident?

That seems strange, sounds like the staff have over reacted. They should not have removed his stuff if he still had a booking for the room. He asked a reasonable question which a manager agreed to, so next time he stayed he did the same thing, the other member of staff was not very nice to say no. Think he needs to make a complaint.

You are getting rather a hard time on here OP, but that's MN for you! I would be phoning the manager to discuss it with them, and if that didn't provide any answers I would write a bad review and advise everyone I know not to use that particular hotel. Obviously your DP needs to find another place to stay in future.

All contracts have terms and conditions. They don't need to be written. Some can be drawn from industry practice if not expressly agreed between the parties. You seem to be going round in circles and ignoring responses. The hotel have taken an unusual course of action on the face of the facts presented. Write a letter of complaint and leave a scathing review.

@PearlyShamps

To pack up a guest's items in their absence, and effectively discontinue that guest's stay there, is a really harsh treatment, and it just doesn't add up that they would do something so extreme for such a minor incident. Either the other member of staff is reporting it as a bigger deal than it was, or your husband is playing it down.

I assume he'd been an exemplary guest prior to this incident?

It did occur to me too, that maybe the staff member took a dislike to the OP’s husband and decided to embellish the truth and make out he was being super aggressive to get him chucked out.

Tell him to ask where they packed his new IPad?

I think he should make a complaint too. In writing. So the op can see the email he sent. And the reply. As i think the truth will out then.

Unfortunately I don’t think he will as he won’t want the op to see the reason he was put out as I don’t think it was a curry. It must have been wayyy worse than that. Sorry OP but I don’t think your mild mannered husband is telling you the full truth.

And the name of this hotel?
I'm dying to know