If a hotel worker does this one thing during check-in, you need to ask for a new room immediately. At least, that’s this military soldier’s advice after her situation escalated, leading her to leave the hotel.
In a viral video with more than 9 million views, Kay Armstrong (@shopthree22) explains that she was returning home after a six-month deployment. After 15 hours of flying, she was exhausted and needed a hotel to crash into before catching another flight the next day.
Seeing that there was an Aloft hotel near the airport, Armstrong went there. As she walked in, dressed in full uniform, Armstrong noticed a man sitting near the front desk wearing a puffer jacket with the hood up, a white T-shirt, shorts, and socks with no shoes. He was also holding a half-smoked Black and Mild cigar, she says.
They both looked at each other and as Armstrong made it to the front desk, the man started mean-mugging her (staring at her intensely with an attitude).
Armstrong had to wait longer than usual at the front desk because their computer system was down, so she started chatting with the front desk attendant and a flight attendant who also just arrived.
The worker finally got things working again, but that’s when she did the one thing she shouldn’t do, especially when interacting with female guests. She said Armstrong’s room number out loud.
If someone overhears the number, they could specifically target you in your room. In Armstrong’s case, there was already a suspicious man in the vicinity.
While Armstrong was hyper-aware that the man possibly knew her room number, she decided not to make a big deal out of it since she was exhausted and ready to go to bed.
But just as the elevator was about to close and deliver her to a warm bed, the lobby man ran to the elevator and got in. He requested floor five, which is the same floor number that Armstrong was staying on. But luckily, the flight attendant from earlier also got on and headed to seven.
“We get to five first, and it dings. He looks at me, and I look at him. He looks at me again, and I look back at him. He gets off the elevator, but he is mugging me the whole way by, and even after he got off, he was looking back over his shoulder at me,” Armstrong recounts.
She ended up going back down to the front desk. Initially, she was just asking for her room to be changed because she didn’t feel comfortable with the man knowing her room number. But when she saw him come back down to the lobby and try to eavesdrop on her, she decided to cancel her reservation completely and Uber to another hotel.
@shopthree22 #stitch with @darleneoctavia ♬ original sound – Kay Armstrong
According to the front desk worker, that man is there all the time, and his room is on the fifth floor. But, the employee shared that they have had complaints about him.
“So why the f*ck is he still allowed to stay there?” Armstrong thought to herself.
“All that to say, y’all, please, if you work at that counter, don’t give out that room number out loud. And for those of you that are traveling, keep your motherf*cking head on a swivel,” Armstrong says in the clip.
The Daily Dot reached out to Armstrong for comment via Instagram direct message and to Aloft via email.
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