Whole new meaning to cleaning out the room

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Helping yourself to the contents of your hotel room is nothing new – there are many who wouldn’t have a towel in the house if it weren’t for the branded ones they liberated from their overnight stays.

Those little bottles of shampoo are always handy in case you’re caught short – even if they are of such indistinguishable origin they might well be washing up liquid or a small bottle of oil for your car engine.

There isn’t a home in the country that hasn’t half a dozen ‘liberated’ pint glasses from pubs or hotels – even the Christmas Market nodded to that by charging a five euro deposit on the glass before they’d give you a drink.

Throwaway slippers, bottle openers, emergency toiletries, toothbrushes, pens, stationary, those nice wooden hangers….it’s a wonder that the bed is left in some rooms such is the comprehensive clear-out some customers carry out.

One story might illustrate this sense of entitlement – although it will remain anonymous to save the blushes of one rather naïve one-time motoring correspondent for a national newspaper, during his early days on the road many years ago.

These guys have great jobs – test driving free cars, normally on roads close to home but more than occasionally in foreign parts and one in a while on a Formula One track.

On top of that, the car manufacturers might offer a tasty little present left on the hotel pillow to sweeten an already saccharine deal.

On this occasion, however, and presumably through an oversight there was no present for the motoring press to ease the pain of their foreign travel – and our intrepid reporter inquired of his fellow hacks if they had been similarly bereft.

Colour televisions were in their relative infancy at this time and there was one of them in the hotel room – clearly, at least to everyone bar our motoring man, for the benefit of anyone who booked into the room.

His colleague however – recognising his innocence in such matters – told him that in fact the colour TV was his welcoming gift; it was plugged in so he could get used to it during his stay and he just had to bring it with him on departure.

Which he did – arriving down to reception, lugging his suitcase and one large colour television, newly unplugged from the wall.

When his colleagues stopped rolling around on the lobby carpet in fits of laughter, the television was duly returned to its rightful spot – and the story was told a thousand times before our friend finally retired from journalism.

Extraordinary as it might seem to try and make off with the telly through some sense of entitlement, a recent survey found that hotel guests have helped themselves to the most extraordinary of things on their departure.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.