When Marriott first introduced mobile check-in at certain hotels, they apparently weren’t pre-authorizing guest credit cards for the stay. I’m told a not insignificant number of people checked in under false names and loaded prepaid debit cards with very low balances, just walking away from their hotel bills.

It’s the modern hotel equivalent of ‘dine and dash’ although a hotel guest in Guizhou, China shows it’s still possible to just go old school. He climbed out the window of his room and “onto thin telephone wires to get to another building all the way across the street” in order to escape his room charges.

Unfortunately, he appears to have underestimated how difficult that would be, and he’s seen struggling to keep his balance, even swinging his body over the swaying wire to anchor it.

Eventually, he ends up trapped between two wires, dangling at a height estimated to be around the 19th floor… he was swinging quite near to a bunch of high-voltage power lines

Naturally there’s video of our Darwin Award-winning hotel guest:

The man was eventually rescued by firefights and then arrested.

Another way to do this, it seems, is just to pretend you’re the previous guest and run up thousands of dollars in charges.

(HT: Heels First Travel)