Hotels

I was in car with someone who had a local station on the radio. They were interviewing someone who had started a web site on hotel bed jumping. People send in pics of themselves jumping on the beds. I said a prayer of thanks for satellite radio.

Years ago, I was in the hotel business, partnering in mid to low price range properties, east of the Mississippi. I came to define a hotel room as a place people go to do things they wouldn’t even consider doing in their own homes. If you haven’t been in the business, you probably have little idea what people will do. There were times when I questioned if the damages were created by humans.

The worst business was softball tournaments. There’s something hardwired in the mentality that demands getting drunk and trashing everything in sight.

The most distasteful business, from my perspective, was “Maggos.” This was the staff’s term. I referred to them as slavers.

The ads begin running in the job classifieds in the spring, targeting adolescents. They promise a summer of free travel and fun. The companies running them are magazine subscription sales agencies of a somewhat smarmy ilk.

These agencies sell door-to-door, quoting prices on a weekly or monthly basis to keep the cost perception low and load up the buyer. They zero in on less educated consumers in lower class neighborhoods.

Once the unwary teens are recruited, they are packed into a van driven by their handler. They will be taken cross-country, spending a few days in each town. The teens are stuffed to capacity into cheap hotel rooms. They are awoken early in the morning, driven to a street corner in a bad neighborhood and dropped there for the day with a sales quota and threats for not making it. They spend the rest of the day wearing off shoe leather in the summer heat and are picked up on the corner much later in the day. The lesser producers are chastised and ridiculed in front of their colleagues. Their handler provides meals, which consist of small portions of fast food or deli lunchmeat.

Stuffing a room with browbeaten adolescents does not wear well on the fixtures. They take out their frustration and homesickness on the facility.

I encountered a Maggo handler who adorned himself in mirrored sunglasses, ten gallon hat and six-foot iguana draped across his shoulders. After witnessing him whipsawing a young girl into tears, I considered feeding his iguana to him. Wouldn’t be fair to the reptile. Maybe the other way around.

Rich kids were another problem. They couldn’t hold their unfettered parties at the regal homes of their parents, so they rented rooms. It wasn’t just the property damage that was the problem. Most of them did not think the laws of society applied to them.

One of our two-story properties was on the east coast of Florida. A young male, with a last name you would recognize, rented a string of second floor rooms with balconies. He and his toadies trolled the bars with their Porsches for young, unwary girls, and brought their catch back to the hotel. When one of them was uncooperative, the host tossed her off the balcony. Fortunately, some foliage broke her fall and she wasn’t fatally injured. The prominent family bought their way out of trouble and publicity, a scenario I would see oft-repeated.

Some of the business you might think to be bad wasn’t that bad at all. The “hot sheet” trade was rooms rented for a couple hours, often during the day or right after work. Properties consisting of several elongated buildings with parking at the door and out of sight from the road were popular for this. Surreptitious couples did not like hotels where you park out in front of the lobby, where someone might recognize a vehicle.

Then, there was the high end strippers, who worked toney “gentlemen’s clubs,” especially in Florida and Texas. They usually were on tour and needed a place for two or three months. The clubs like to keep fresh inventory.

These women were very pretty and trained in choreography. They came in quietly in the wee hours of the morning, got up at noon and sunned themselves by the pool until they went to work (not a bad draw for some other business). They were professionals and no trouble at all.

Partners tend to settle into roles. One of mine loved to negotiate a “steal” and wasn’t especially interested in ascertaining if it was a viable property. My role was to take whatever cats and dogs he brought in and make them work.

My partner bought a hotel on I-95 near Quantico, VA. I went over to assess the damage. I walked the property and then met with the manager. My message was succinct. The clientele was half drug dealers and half cheap hookers. Clean it up or we’ll never get any volume of legitimate trade.

His reply was equally terse. “Throw out dealers, for what I get paid?” Good point. He suggested I might want to do it, so he could see how. I wasn’t paying myself enough for that.

I had some contacts over at the Quantico training facility from the old days. Many people think they train just Marines, but the FBI and DEA also have their academies there.

I went over to the base and passed out free trial coupons they could use to house people in for training and other things. They sometimes had overflow. I returned to the hotel and told the manager to expect a flood of law enforcement trainees and a subsequent reduction in criminals. I had a hard time concealing pride in this creative solution.

A couple weeks later, I saw the influx of the coupons on reports and called the manager to see how it was working out with all the federal agents running around. “The dealers moved out, but we have more hookers than ever.” Your tax dollars at work.

While frustrating, the hotel business never fell short of interesting. It provided some pithy insights into human nature, especially among those who used this segment of lodging. We catered to young families, seniors, constructions crews and salespeople. Road warriors (traveling salespeople) look out for each other. Next time you stay at an inexpensive hotel, check under the mattress and you’ll probably see what I mean.