The basic answer to the guest from hell is to focus on educating employees on this kind of personality and then letting them have fun predicting what the guest will do or say next. When employees recognize the characteristics in a guest, they also know why they behave as they do, see them for what they are, and can predict how they will behave. Employees no longer think "mea culpa" and "mea lose my job" when assailed by such guests. One sees through the intensely mean-spirited and unjust smokescreen and confusion to a miserable individual whose only ability to create an effect has been reduced to upsetting others.

With such an understanding, one can still provide the smiling service expected of one, but without the dagger in one's heart. For violence, expressed or unexpressed, only exists in the absence of understanding. The analogy I like to draw is the martial art of Aikido. The basic principle is not to resist or try to stop the antagonist's motion, but to redirect it. In other words, one does not present a target for the opponent to connect with.

By empowering employees, one un-empowers the antisocial guests, for the only power these actually have is ...