After a holiday spent relaxing and abdicating responsibility, it’s understandable that you might leave something behind in your hotel room when you check out. An item of clothing, a mobile phone, a souvenir maybe – but what about €20,000 in cash, a shark, or your false teeth?
When it comes to luxury hotels, Great Hotels of the World (www.ghotw.com) knows best. Recently, they asked their members for the strangest items left behind in their luxury hotel properties – and here’s what the found. Chalk it up to eccentric millionaires?
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10 Strangest items left behind in hotel rooms
1) Sex toys: the Quay Hotel in Wales, who once found ‘a tribal style doll with a wooden pop-up appendage in one of the rooms. We leave it to you to make up your own mind as to what that could be used for.
2) False teeth: In one case of forgotten teeth, a guest at the Eurostars Grand Marina GL in Barcelona requested the hotel send the dentures back to the UK. Knowing how reliable Royal Mail can sometimes be, we wonder if they got lost along the way.
3) Wigs: The next most common items left behind after false teeth are wigs. Not necessarily strange, though it does make you wonder how someone can forget something so crucial behind, especially if they checked in the mirror before leaving.
4) Money: Hotel Milano in Bergamo takes the crown with a couple who once forgot 20,000 Euros in cash in their dresser. The hotel contacted them at the airport as they were about to board their flight. They returned to the hotel and chose to stay an extra night, which, considering the amount of money they’d left behind, probably was small change to them.
5) Dogs: Grand Hotel Principe Piemonte hotel near Pisa once found a dog in one of their rooms, with little additional explanation or requests to return it to their owners.
6) Birds: The Gran Hotel Bahia del Duque hotel in Tenerife once found a caged cockatoo in a room. The owners subsequently asked for it to be flown back to them in a private jet. Which makes you wonder: if they cared that much for it, why forget it in the first place?
7) Fish: The Tivoli Marina Vilamoura in the Algarve has the strangest animal-related story. One of their guests went fishing at the hotel and came back with a shark, which he kept in the bathtub at the hotel – not realising that sharks need saltwater, not tap water. When the poor creature began to weaken, the guest apparently decided to leave it behind, giving the cleaner the fright of her life when she came in to tidy the room. The shark was promptly returned to its natural habitat, and lived what we can only hope to be a long and fulfilled life.
8) Wedding rings: At Hotel Ranga in Iceland, one married couple checked out of the room and left a wedding ring behind. It was never claimed – which maybe means the holiday didn’t go as planned.
9) Car keys: Leaving car keys behind seems to be another common occurrence – but when you drive a Ferrari, it’s inexcusable. At the Hesperia Tower hotel in Barcelona a guest left behind the keys to their Ferrari Testarossa. Upon finding them the staff ran to the parking lot to check if the car was still there – it wasn’t. It’s anyone’s guess how the guest got away without his car keys.
10) Unidentified objects: The Londa hotel in Cyprus stumbled upon a proper Da Vinci Code-style riddle when they found a book with ‘an odd cover’ and no title in one of their rooms. Upon opening it they found it to be written in a ‘strange language’. With it was a locked box which had no apparent keyhole on it.
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