A Sydney couple have been left bailing water in their five-star Chinese hotel after they misunderstood the instructions for their ‘mini-pool’.
Graham Bernard, 49, and his wife Jodie booked out a suite in the Iseya Panoramic Hotel in Chongqing which offers 360 degree views of the ‘5D’ city.
Another of the room’s draw cards was the wet-edge, ‘pool-sized’ bathtub.
‘We’d seen the hotel on TikTok and thought it looked incredible, so we made sure to get a room with a pool,’ Mr Bernard said.
After arriving, the Sydney Gym owner and his wife left the room for a day in July and asked hotel staff to fill the bathtub for them while they were out.
‘We came back, got our swimmers on, popped open a bottle of champagne and relaxed. Next minute we’re getting texts about water and flooding,’ Mr Bernard said.
The hotel asked the couple if there ‘was any bathtub water in (their) room’.
‘Could you please turn off the water in the bathtub? There will be a water leakage downstairs after it is full,’ a text read.
‘We didn’t think we’d need to turn the water off in a wet-edge pool – we weren’t doing dive bombs or doing (anything) deliberately,’ Mr Bernard explained.
‘Dramatically, the doorbell rang, and all of a sudden it felt like a CSI TV scene.’
A manager and three cleaners arrived and pointed out a sign in Chinese asking guests to turn the taps off if the pool was full.
They informed them the flooding was seeping down to lower floors.
Footage shared to social media showed the ns labouring away with the staff to remove buckets of water from the tub.
‘We might have flooded downstairs with our big pool because we filled it up too much,’ Mr Bernard said.
The clip racked up more than 18million views, and left commenters divided.
‘Why would you think this is funny? I hope they charged you,’ one wrote.
‘Okay this isn’t funny. Usually I’m all for antics but this is just inconveniencing so many people,’ another said.
‘So you guys started splashing around and making everyone else’s lives hell,’ a third accused.
But others saw the humour in the situation.
‘This hotel room looks incredible! (Minus the faulty overflow drain, obviously),’ one joked.
‘That seems like a design flaw, there’s no way you could have known,’ a second wrote.
Hotel staff later informed Mr Bernard the leakage was not the couple’s fault.
The issue was caused by a drain blockage, and the hotel apologised for the inconvenience.
‘They were great with us and apologised every time we saw them. And yes – we did use the bath again,’ Mr Bernard said.
Chongqing is known as China’s ‘5D city’, where overlapping highways, bridges and rail lines run above and below each other, creating a layered transport system unique to the region.
It is often described as a ‘vertical city’ because its mountainous terrain foundation means buildings are constructed on steep slopes and different floors can serve as ground level.