The Valentine’s Day Hotel That Couldn’t Spell Love: A Hilarious Tale of “Vanlentine’s” Gone Wrong
Imagine stepping into a hotel straight out of your wildest theme-park dreams: a room with a Chevy truck as your bed, another with Roman statues watching you sleep, all nestled inside the world’s largest shopping mall. Now, imagine those fantasy suites decked out for the most romantic night of the year—except every single sign, flyer, and banner is wishing you a Happy Vanlentine’s Day.
Welcome to the tale of the most infamous typo in hotel history: a hilarious, all-too-human reminder that sometimes, love really is blind—especially to spelling mistakes.
Themed Rooms, Big Dreams, and One Giant Mall
Back in the 90s, as one Reddit storyteller (u/LOUDCO-HD) recalls, working at a Canadian destination hotel meant every shift was a little surreal. Five themed rooms, from a “Truck Room” (with an actual Chevy bed and traffic lights) to a Roman fantasy suite, lured guests not just for the decor but for the bragging rights. After all, who wouldn’t want to say they spent the weekend under neon signs or in a Caesar-worthy lair, all within a 5.2 million-square-foot mall that doubled as a water park and amusement park?
But come February, business slowed. Enter Valentine’s Day—the perfect excuse for management to “pull out all the stops” with a romantic, three-night extravaganza: dinners, breakfasts in bed, rose petals, and an advertising campaign that would blanket the hotel and mall in hearts, Cupids, and…oh dear.
When Spellcheck Fails—and Nobody Notices
What could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, only one tiny (yet enormous) detail: the entire print campaign—banners, tent cards, flyers, you name it—spelled “Valentine’s” as “Vanlentine’s.” That’s right: a single, sneaky ‘n’ turned a holiday of love into a running joke.
And here’s the kicker: nobody noticed. Not the battalion of banquet ladies who plastered the signs everywhere, not the managers, not the guests. The front office supervisor himself only spotted the error after several elevator rides and a nagging sense that something was off. As the OP puts it, “When you look at the sign printed in big red letters, with hearts, and Cupid shooting bows and arrows, your brain just automatically recognizes the word, without you actually reading it.”
Commenters jumped on this brain-glitch phenomenon. u/DaneAlaskaCruz pointed out, “It has been shown that we do not really read every letter in a word…Our brains just automatically plug in the expected letters.” Proofreading, they noted, is way harder with your own work for exactly this reason—your mind fills in what you expect to see. This is why, as one copy editor added, “I made so many corrections to articles sent in for publishing”—it’s always easier to spot errors in someone else’s text.
The Cost of a Typo: Too Expensive to Fix, Too Funny Not to Tell
So what did management do when the mistake was discovered? Absolutely nothing. The original poster, a diligent supervisor, reported it up the chain. But the director of sales, faced with 10 pallets of “Vanlentine’s Day” swag and a budget-conscious ownership group, decided to “just run with it.” The cost and time to reprint everything was too high.
A few guests noticed, but the vast majority didn’t. In fact, as the OP recounts, “we only received about half a dozen reports over the entire time the content was up!” One commenter, u/Javaman1960, who’s spent decades in the printing industry, wasn’t surprised: “Sometimes we have to beg the customers to be allowed to fix typos. Many of them don't care, some are grateful, and some are offended that you dared to bring it up.”
Even funnier, the hotel reused the same misprinted materials the next year—because why let a good typo (and a mountain of unused posters) go to waste?
Why Our Brains Miss the Obvious—and Why We Love These Stories
The “Vanlentine’s” saga is more than just a corporate facepalm; it’s a case study in how the human brain (and bureaucracy) works. As u/RetiredBSN shared, our minds gloss over extra letters or even duplicate words—like the famous “MEET ME AT THE THE SMOKE RING” button from the 1964 World’s Fair. Our brains are wired for meaning, not perfection.
And let’s face it: stories like these are a welcome reminder that even the biggest, flashiest businesses are run by humans—humans who make hilarious, relatable mistakes. As another commenter, u/cbmccallon, reminisced about their own workplace typo (“Plumbling and Heating” t-shirts), it’s clear that these errors become inside jokes, shared memories, and, occasionally, collector’s items.
So next time you spot a misspelled sign or wear a shirt with a printing error, remember: you’re part of a proud tradition of “Vanlentine’s” celebrants everywhere.
Share Your Own Tales of Typo Woe!
Have you ever witnessed a corporate typo that made it past a dozen sets of eyes? Did your workplace embrace the error, or scramble to fix it? Drop your stories in the comments below—because nothing says “love” like laughing together at our most human moments.
Happy (Vanlentine’s) Day, everyone!
Original Reddit Post: Happy Vanlentines Day everybody!