The Zero Guest Protocol
A Hotel Satire

About this book:

At the Marble Palace Resort, November is officially closed for the season—but unofficially, it's the busiest month of the year. To fool the hospitality algorithms that control their summer rankings, the skeleton staff runs a full-scale simulation: fake guests, staged luggage, piped-in piano music, and Julian the concierge cycling through three distinct personas in a single afternoon. General Manager Arthur Pendelton orchestrates the deception with military precision, data analyst Chloe engineers the digital footprint, and Mrs. Gable picks up imaginary towels with the weary disdain of someone who's seen every corporate nightmare. The machine believes the hotel is thriving at sixty-two percent occupancy. Then a real travel writer books a room through a forgotten legacy portal, lands in three hours, and specializes in eviscerating exactly this kind of fraud.

What follows is a masterclass in high-stakes improvisation: eleven employees must become a convincing luxury crowd for an audience of one. Every meal service, poolside splash, and overheard conversation must be choreographed in real time—without letting the algorithm detect the sudden drop in "ghost" activity, and without letting Jasper Wells realize he's the only guest in a three-hundred-room palace. As the staff rotates through roles—valet, sommelier, fellow travelers, even the ghost writer himself—the line between performance and reality frays, and the hotel's elaborate fiction develops a logic all its own.

Sharp, absurd, and uncomfortably recognizable, *The Zero Guest Protocol* satirizes a world where authenticity is a metric to be gamed, hospitality is a content stream, and the only thing more exhausting than performing perfection is trying to sustain it when someone's actually watching. Perfect for fans of *The White Lotus*, *Severance*, and anyone who's ever wondered who's really behind the five-star reviews.