Unsafe situations happen when traveling, it’s unfortunately sometimes part of the journey, but experiencing a dangerous situation in your hotel room is somewhat unexpected.
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Back in 2017, I was traveling through South Africa with my sister. We had started in Johannesburg and we’re heading down to Capetown.
We had booked a bus to travel between cities. Basically, you buy a one-way ticket on a bus and can stop off in multiple cities. It was honestly the cheapest and the best way to travel. Anyways, on that specific day, we were arriving in the city of Gqeberha.
Port Elizabeth is located between Durban and Capetown. For reference, it’s about an 8h drive to Capetown from Gqeberha.
Gqeberha was a mandatory stop with our bus. We arrived quite late in Gqeberha and dusk had already fallen. We had reserved what we thought was a nice three-star hotel.
The drivers of the bus service we used are used to droping off guests at certain accommodations. However, our driver told us he had never dropped off other people to this hotel (this should have been a red flag for us). The driver was really kind and wanted to make sure we had a reservation. He came inside with us, since it was so late there were no more receptionists at the reception, there was only the security guard. The security guard checked our reservation and confirmed he could proceed to check us in. We thanked our driver and said goodbye.
The security guard showed us to our room. The hotel was ok, nothing great but it had interesting architecture and looked like a British historical building. The room wasn’t that clean but we we’re honestly too tired to complain to reception.
After unpacking our stuff, and going through our nighttime routing we both had a well-deserved snooze.
I was woken up at 4:30 am – 5 am ish. I was hearing odd sounds of someone trying to get in our room. Sure enough a few seconds after I was in utter shock! The security guy from the night before who had given us our room was now inside our room. He hadn’t knocked or announced himself in any way. I started screaming and yelling! I told the guy to get out of our room and I was screaming at the very top of my lungs. My sister woke up as soon as I started yelling. I asked the guy “Why the fuck he was in our room?”, he answered that “we had asked for a special wakeup”. I told him that was bullshit and we never asked for such a thing.
The man ran out of our room and kept saying he was sorry.
We both started immediately packing our stuff, we got dressed for the day, and went down to reception. I explained to the receptionist what had happened. She was just as shocked as we were. She assured us no such thing had ever happened. The security guy was brought to the reception to try and explain himself once more. He kept saying “We had asked for a special wakeup”. We both said this wasn’t true at all. I also added that even if a guest asked for a “Wakeup call” in no shape or form must a man enter a room without knocking or turning on the light, and that I had never heard of a wakeup call in person… usually these are made through the phone.
We no longer felt safe at this hotel. We had initially booked two nights which were fully refunded, we used the extra cash to book a nicer room in another part of town.
Many years later, we’re still both convinced that the security guy didn’t just want to give us a “special wakeup”. I don’t think he expected me to scream that strongly and react like that at such an early hour in the morning. I feel like we both dodged a bullet that day, and I’m glad nothing else happened.
