Redditor Georgialucy returned from her trip to France a few years ago with many new memories – and a whole new set of recommended videos on YouTube. “I had no idea why I was being recommended bar mitzvah playlists and Spider-Man videos on YouTube,” she wrote in a Reddit thread.
Then it dawned on her: she had left her YouTube account logged in on the TV in the Airbnb where she was staying.
This is, of course, both a nice convenience and a potential inconvenience of modern travel: All sorts of hotels and Airbnbs offer the ability to log into countless streaming services directly from the TVs in their rooms (the ultimate feeling of being at home even when you’re far away), but the vacation spirit and rush to check out mean you’re likely to forget to log out of your accounts before you leave.
This is how you finally get your Bar Mitzvah and Spider Man Videos as someone who officially grew up a long time ago (or is more of a DCU person). Especially when the person staying in the hotel room or Airbnb after you is more of a troll than a guest. “Some people forgot to log out of Netflix in our hotel room, so we gave them new names and icons,” another Redditor boasted in another thread. To wit: Ian’s account became “Ian’t.” (Hey, no one ever said that was particularly clever or not childish.)
Netflix has been a staple of the hotel experience since 2015, when Marriott was the first chain to offer it for free in its rooms. Two years later, it was Hyatt’s turn, and many other hotels soon followed, including the InterContinental, Four Seasons, Best Western and Wyndham. The only problem is all the hasty forgetfulness when checking out. “We always listen to feedback from our members and have found that forgetting to log off after a short stay is a major annoyance for many,” a Netflix spokesperson tells me.
Of course, this is not the absolute worst thing you can forget in a hotel room or Airbnb accommodation – there are people who have left much more behind personal article—but it’s at least a little unsettling to have a stranger browse (and potentially change) your Netflix viewing habits.
That’s why Netflix has made it super easy to remedy this. In your account settings, you can use the “Manage access and devices” option to see the last few devices that have streamed from your account. If you find that you’re still logged into the TV in your hotel in Paris, for example, you can log out of that particular device with just one click. It also helps to change your password afterward.
Hotels are also doing their best to prevent “streaming service theft.” “Every time a guest checks out, checks in, or changes rooms, our system initiates a unique login process for all streaming apps,” explains a Hilton spokesperson. “If a guest forgets to check out, this process will also be performed on the guest’s day of departure.”
The same thing happens at every other Netflix partner hotel. “We work with our partner hotels and internet service providers to implement an automatic reset feature that deletes member information upon checkout,” the Netflix spokesperson says. “If the reset ever fails, hotel staff will manually delete account information.”
That seems to be true. “I was on vacation this summer and stayed at a Marriott,” Redditor goli14 explained in a thread about the topic on the Netflix subreddit. “They had most of the streaming apps. I signed up for Netflix and was automatically signed out on checkout day.”
However, not all hotels are Netflix partners, so if you are looking for unusual bar mitzvahs or Spider Man activity on your account, you may want to delete these old devices yourself. Not that it is always a bad thing if someone else is using your account. After all, even Georgialucy had to admit at some point: “I miss the Spider-Man “Video.”
