A video showing a hotel worker’s hilariously dramatic attempt to avoid having to greet a guest has gone viral on TikTok.
The video was shared by @slaywithbitsy and has had 5.4 million views since it was first posted on March 5.
A message overlaid on the clip reads: “POV (point of view): You work at a hotel but have no patience to talk to guest in the morning.”
The video, which appears to be security camera footage, shows a woman sitting in front of a computer at what appears to be a reception desk in the hotel lobby.
The hotel worker suddenly drops to the floor and ducks down while crawling across the room, sending another chair spinning as she disappears out of the video frame. A man is later shown entering the hotel and approaching the empty front desk.
The post comes as U.S. hotel occupancy is expected to reach 63.6 percent in 2024, 3.4 percent shy of the 65.8 percent reported in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic, marking “a significant improvement” over 2020’s historic low of 43.8 percent, according to the “2024 State of the Industry” report by the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA).
Friendliness as well as cleanliness remain “essential to positive guest experiences,” the AHLA report found. A survey asking consumers what steps hotels should take to ensure their guests enjoy a positive experience, found that travelers “ranked guestroom cleanliness, property cleanliness, and friendly staff as the most important factors.”
The AHLA report said, “U.S. hotels lost more than 680,000 direct employees in one year from 2019 to 2020.” Three years later, the hotel workforce has not yet fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels, with more than 67.6 percent of hoteliers having experienced staffing shortages in January 2024.
‘What Overthinking Gets You’
Appearing to spot someone behind the front desk, the guest in the viral clip says, “good morning” and the hotel worker reappears in the video frame, replying “good morning.”
“What time I must check out?” the man asks and the woman replies, “11 a.m.,” before the man walks away from the desk.
The camera later switches to a view of what appears to be a backroom area of the hotel front desk to where the woman dashed towards earlier in the video.
A message overlaid on the clip says, “This view is too mf funny.” The woman is suddenly shown diving into a far corner of the room as a chair is shown spinning next to her. She crawls into the backroom, later grabbing an empty container from a shelf before walking out the room as the clip ends.
A caption says: “I’m really over in tears yooo, because why I still came out to talk to the guest.”
TikTokers were in stitches over the latest viral clip, such as @sunnjjuni who wrote this is “a visual representation of what overthinking gets you.”
Lysa Jordan noted “The little crawl. I’d just stop and cry” and tomassishness wrote: “The panic grabbing random items from the back.”
User ithinkimkindafunny pointed out the “good morning” greeting from the worker “seconds after headbutting an office chair.”
Meagan said: “The twirling chair is sending me” and Raven Elyse wrote: “The way you fumbled every part of this plan.”
Lyla_Sweetz noted: “That fall made you forget you didn’t feel like talking to nobody.”
Newsweek has contacted the original poster for comment via TikTok. This video has not been independently verified.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.