Oh, the joy of wedding guests at a hotel

Today, children, we will revisit a topic that has been a favorite of ours over the years and yet never ceases to amaze this instructor: hotel guests who are in town for a wedding at some other location than the hotel where they are staying.  Yes, a long title, one that I like to condense into GNATS:  Guests Not At The Site.  Yes, it lacks the W for wedding, but I like calling them gnats, so that's what they shall be named. 

I work at a 12 room hotel in the quiet hamlet of Glen Ellen, Sonoma County.  This past weekend, Memorial Day, how fitting, 6 rooms of gnats checked in on Friday.  On Saturday 4 more rooms arrived and the last two came in very, very early (while other non-gnats where still sipping their morning coffee) on Sunday morning. Interspersed with these gnats were regular guests who were subjected to loud, obnoxious behavior about which we, the front desk, could do little to abate.  Thank goodness those guests were gone by Sunday, the day of the real festivities, aka the Wedding.

These asshole gnats were drunk or stoned most of the time.  They stayed up til almost dawn on Sat-Sun-Monday mornings, some of them staying up past dawn, never going to bed.  They drank a lot. They smoked dope a lot. They broke things. They were rude, loud, cheap and nasty.   It was the first wedding of the season that this hotel has encountered (it's their first year in business, so I am cutting them some slack here) and I think they are already re-thinking their position on wedding buy-outs for 2014. 

I could go on and on, I could give examples of their loutish gnat behavior beyond the obvious cigarette butts in the hot tub, broken window screens in the rooms, red wine spilled on the walkways, rooms reeking of smoke..... but suffice it to say, it was not a pleasant weekend. Not one of the gnats were even remotely nice or fun or gracious.  No one tipped anyone, their rooms were disgustingly filthy and we were all happy that they all felt like shit on Monday morning, the day after the wedding.  Hangovers were too good for them.  Needles in their eyes might have been better.

Ah, well..... no wedding group this weekend but there is another one coming up. And throughout the entire season there are wedding groups almost every weekend.  I am not holding my breath.... the guests will be good or bad or somewhere in-between.  It will be nice when the season is over.  In November.  It's a long ways away.