The 10 Most Outrageous Hotel Concierge Requests

On any given day, hotel concierge Kalindra Ashleigh might help guests book dinner reservations, track down a lost cell phone—or have a freshly caught shark shipped to Abu Dhabi.

“As a concierge, you never know what your day is going to entail and what miracles you may have to pull off,” says Ashleigh, a concierge at the Montage Beverly Hills. In the case of the shark, a visiting prince had caught the fish and wanted it shipped home intact—but unfortunately, thorny customs issues got in the way. “Instead, I offered to have a taxidermist transform it into a trophy for the prince,” she says. (He declined.)

With their wide network of contacts, concierges are “logistical experts, ambassadors of the city, and most important, during your stay, the facilitators of your life,” says Ashleigh. At high-end hotels like the Montage, you’re more likely to find a concierge who belongs to Les Clefs d’Or, a global organization of veteran concierges whose code promises to “attend to any request so long as it is moral, legal and kind.”

While the shark incident is proof that not every desire can be fulfilled, most guests’ requests are pretty straightforward: According to a Hotels.com survey, 68 percent of concierges in the U.S. and Mexico say they get asked most about sightseeing recommendations. (A good rule of thumb: Tip your concierge about $10 for a good dinner or tour recommendation, and at least $20 for more complicated requests.)

When we checked with concierges from around the world, however, we found that they regularly field requests that go well beyond a nice walking tour suggestion. In Paris, one family asked for two small lions to be waiting in their hotel room for their daughter’s birthday party. At the hotel that inspired The Shining, two guests requested to have dinner with the resident ghosts. And back in Beverly Hills, one guest enlisted a concierge to organize an elaborate wedding—for her show collie.

In fact, many of the most colorful concierge requests seem to involve weddings, proposals, or some other bit of romance engineering. At São Paulo’s Hotel Unique, one heartsick guest asked the concierge to help him stage a Cinderella moment to woo back his love. “Ultimately, I don’t think the relationship worked out,” says a hotel spokesperson, “but getting a horse carriage and a glass slipper was quite a feat.”

See the 10 most outrageous hotel concierge requests >

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Guests at the The Stanley Hotel were disappointed that could not have dinner with the ghosts.

This secluded mountain resort inspired Stephen King’s The Shining, so it’s no surprise that guests regularly have questions about the lodge’s paranormal quirks (like furniture moving by itself, the sounds of invisible children or visions of the founders, F. O. and Flora Stanley, roaming the property). But one evening, a couple asked concierge Bonnie Watson if they could have dinner with the ghosts of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley in the hotel’s Cascades restaurant. Since The Beyond is not typically within a concierge’s network of contacts, Watson says she had to politely disappoint the guests: “They are off the clock tonight,” she says she told them.

Two guests at the Four Seasons in Whistler asked to have a chunk of glacier shipped to South Carolina.

Concierges book plenty of day trips for guests—like, at this Canadian resort, helicopter tours to visit a nearby glacier. But two guests at the Four Seasons came back from their glacier trip carrying a large cube of ice in a brown box, and wanted it shipped home—to South Carolina. Chief Concierge Hana Lynn arranged for a freezer box that could be shipped by air—and asked that the pilot make Whistler the last stop before heading east. She says the guest called two days later to report the ice cube had arrived in perfect glacial condition, and was then rendered into glacial-ice cocktails. “Definitely my most challenging request to date,” Lynn says.

A guest at The Duke St. James asked for an onion ring the size of his head.

Concierges often help guests navigate dietary restrictions—food allergies, special diets or religious observances—as well as culinary peculiarities. “We once had an American guest who asked for an onion ring the size of his head,” says concierge Ian Haigh at The Dukes St. James, in London. “He literally wanted the biggest onion ring we could find—it may have been an inside joke between the guests.” Undeterred, Haigh got in touch with some local steakhouses, one of which obliged him. “We had it ready when the family arrived,” he says, “and we made a very happy guest smile.”