Hotel Manager: How Different Ethnic Groups Use Hotels

David Lorentzen is BACK—this time to share his behind-the-scenes experience as a Swedish hotel manager whose family has run hotels for over a decade.

David gives a rare, unfiltered look at cultural differences he has observed as a hotelier: which groups of guests make staff smile and which ones create the biggest headaches. He walks through the three most difficult categories of guests his hotels have hosted — Russian oligarchs, Chinese tour groups, and certain Indian families — with specific, firsthand stories about room damage, cooking in rooms, overcrowding, and the economics of hospitality.

The conversation then shifts to a much larger topic: the refugee housing industry in Sweden. David recounts the multimillion-dollar offers hotels received to house asylum seekers (especially young Afghan males), why his family turned them down, the insurance and property-value consequences, and the two competing integration strategies Sweden has tried (spreading people out vs. concentrating them). He also discusses literacy rates, cultural distance, and why some groups integrate far more easily than others.

You can find David Lorentzon's various accounts and posts here: https://linktr.ee/davidlorentzon

Episode Transcript

And where I basically shared the story about about what what actually happens when the Swedish, I think it’s called emergency service in English, rescue service. They gave us a phone call, and they said that, would you like to house 30 Afghans? And you’ll get paid at the time at that time about $320 per night per child and do that year round. Now he received 30 of them. Okay. That’s like, what, 90,090 thousand dollars a day. Crazy. Yeah. It it turns it it basically your most profitable day becomes every day of the year.

Malcolm Collins [0:42]:

Yeah.

David Lorentzen [0:43]:

And most of it is profit.

Simone Collins [0:45]:

And it’s

David Lorentzen [0:45]:

hard to

Simone Collins [0:46]:

say no. Yeah.

David Lorentzen [0:47]:

You’re basically earning millions of dollars to accept mostly male between the age of 14 and 26 Afghan boys Afghan males.

Simone Collins [0:58]:

Wow.

David Lorentzen [0:58]:

Now this village has about 350 people.

Speaker 4 [1:02]:

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins [1:04]:

Okay. Hello, everyone. I’m so excited for this. we’ll say more off the record, episode in which we interview David Lorenzen about his experience, with different cultural groups from the perspective of a hotel manager. I will say that when we have worked in the travel industry, we’ve been exposed to some really stark cultural differences, even just from, like, working in different parts of the world. And definitely from working with different groups as travelers, it’s kind of amazing. I think we’re mostly raised to believe that everyone’s kind of the same. Everyone does the same thing. We all, like, get up and we eat breakfast, and it’s all the same. Like, it’s broadly, like, cereal and croissants and fruit. And, like, we don’t realize that people actually live very different lives, have very different habits, and that becomes very clear when you get to see a sampling of people go through a specific pace. David Lorenzen is able to speak to this. He’s gonna explain to us why, and then we’re just gonna I I would love to dive into some things that you’ve observed about different behavioral patterns or or habits you’ve noticed from different groups that you’ve been exposed to through the nature of some of your work.

David Lorentzen [2:08]:

Yeah. So about thirteen years ago, my family decided to buy a hotel that was for sale, and we had never ever done anything like this. We my parents were from the tech industry, basically.

Malcolm Collins [2:20]:

Oh, wow.

David Lorentzen [2:21]:

We wanted to change in lifestyle, something healthier than sitting in an office all day. And we bought it when I was 18 years old. So for my entire adult life, I’ve had I’ve been deeply involved with running hotels in the tourism industry.

Malcolm Collins [2:36]:

Mhmm.

David Lorentzen [2:36]:

And I’m a hotel manager. And the reason I can talk about this is because it’s a family owned business, and they can’t fire me. So I got freedom of speech.

Malcolm Collins [2:45]:

That helps. So

David Lorentzen [2:47]:

and I do have to say that, you know, 90% of all our guests in Sweden here are, let’s say, Germanic people. Germans, Austrians, Dutch, Scandinavians, they are wonderful people. They do incredible they really do set the standard with like, I I get happy when whenever I see that they cleaned after themselves to make our jobs easier.

Malcolm Collins [3:10]:

Malcolm, what Simone does, and I get so mad at her.

Simone Collins [3:12]:

He gets super mad. I’m, like, stripping the sheets. I’m trying to clean up. I’m putting all the towels in a, like, folded pile. And he’s like, what are you doing? I’m just being correct, Malcolm.

David Lorentzen [3:21]:

Yes. You’re being correct. And I do the same thing because I I wanna be nice to the cleaners. Yes. But but as we were talking to each other, it says, okay. I’m having a really busy time now. We have to reschedule and so on. You started mentioning, I hope the guests are good to you. So, like, yep. Yeah. We’ve had some bad people too. And I started mentioning that the worst groups we’ve ever had, the bottom three, are Russian oligarchs, Chinese tourist groups, and Indian families, which is a very

Simone Collins [3:56]:

So wild.

David Lorentzen [3:57]:

Strange group to bundle together. And I’ll go through which one do you wanna start with?

Simone Collins [4:03]:

Let’s start. What surprised me the most, because Chinese tourists are kind of famous for being nightmares, especially, like, certain generations of Chinese tourists. But what I’ve not heard about is Russian oligarchs ever being a problem. You’d assume that they would just kind of, like, breeze through and barely stay in the room or something. What’s going on there?

David Lorentzen [4:23]:

Yeah. So we had Russian oligarchs a couple of times, and the moment this has happened multiple times. The moment they come in, they check-in, they check they see the room, they’re not happy with it, they come back, and they try to bribe us. So, like Okay. We’re willing to pay triple the price to get your best room. I’m sorry, sir. The hotel is fully booked. We’re not gonna kick out our guests. So and they insist upon it. No. No. No. We we want we’re paying triple now in cash. And it’s like, okay. No, sir. We’re not doing that. Then the neck the next problem is that over and over again, they party hard in the room. They shoot champagne bottles all over the place. They regularly smoke cigarettes and cigars in the room, which they’re not supposed to do. We tell people that it’s it’s illegal to smoke indoors. So whenever we go into the room after they’ve checked out, it’s like, oh my gosh. It’s a terrible smell. There’s mess everywhere.

Malcolm Collins [5:25]:

Oh, no.

David Lorentzen [5:26]:

And when you have that kind of cigarette smell in a hotel room, you can’t give it out to the next guest for the next three days because you have to open the windows. You have to make sure that the air quality goes up again, and you basically run into this really serious problem that, okay. We’re just now gonna get really bad reviews because we can’t get people this ro