Travelling alone can be a real delight.
You get a huge, fresh bed all to yourself. A toilet for your arse and your arse only. You can indulge in the lone can of Pringles from the mini bar and not have to share.
But there’s a special kind of loneliness that can creep up on your when you’re solo in a hotel room. One minute you’re surfing the cable channels like a supped up like Kelly Slater, the next you’re down and out, crying naked on the floor wishing your mum was there to tuck you in.
I digress.
A hotel over in Belgium knows the perils of feeling lonesome on tour, and so they’re renting out actual goldfish to solo travellers.
The Hotel Charleroi Airport in Gosselies is offering guests the option to rent a fish for just AUD$4.50 a night:
My friend is staying in a hotel in Belgium. They’ve offered her the option of renting a fish for the night, in case she’s lonely. #noshit pic.twitter.com/DG74iRSfhY
— Michelle DC (@Mich_Cooke) September 2, 2017
Supposedly the lil fishie will cure all your sad feels by simply being in your presence. Like a wet dog you can’t pat.
Hotel manager David Dillen told The Independent that the policy has been a hit with guests for years.
“We started a few years ago. The idea was to surprise our guests, as we always try to do. It’s brilliant to see how people react to it. They smile, they take pictures to put on social media. We rent a few fish per week,” he said.
Some folks have called the hotel out online, suggesting that it’s potentially abusive to ‘rent out’ animals. Dillen shot down these claims, assuring that the fish are treated with upmost respect.
“We take very good care of our fish; they have been with us for over four years now, so if they were not taken care of they would have died a long time ago. They also have a big fish-tank in the housekeeping department, with a shelter, oxygen and plants.”
There’s nothing fishy about that.
