Hotel Etiquette: Am I in the Wrong?

I recently spent three great nights at a hotel in Barcelona. The staff was great, up until the last person that I interacted with.

As I was about to call a cab to the airport from my hotel, I was notified of a flight delay at 9:20 p.m., that my flight originally scheduled to depart at 11:15 p.m., was delayed by six hours, so it would arrive early the next morning. I naively chose to wait things out at the hotel lobby rather than head over to the airport right away after this notification. I didn't know that you should still be at the airport for the original scheduled time, as flights can get "un-delayed", and mine wound up doing this. It ended up departing at 1 a.m., so I ended up missing my flight altogether. (And wound up having to pay $200+ for a new one, as they wouldn't re-book me.)

For context, I had checked out of this hotel earlier that morning, but they had stored my luggage that I picked up that evening, and I was now a paying guest at the lobby bar that evening/night, until I was to head to the airport. While the air traffic delays were going on throughout the night, I would have been stranded/homeless for the night if I couldn’t stay in the lobby until I could go to the airport to get things sorted, which I was still planning on doing in the middle of the night, while also staying at the airport until I could finally depart.

At 1 a.m., I was still at the hotel lobby (I had nowhere to go, and couldn't afford another hotel room, when I already was paying for a now unused one for the night at my destination). As I was preparing to go to the airport at that time, I was changing into sweats in the lobby bathroom alone and taking my contact lenses out/makeup off etc. then the lights went completely out, and it was totally pitch black dark in the bathroom. I am a female solo traveler, and it was 1 a.m. and no one else was in the bathroom but me. I couldn’t even see an exit at all. I felt trapped in the dark, it was so scary. I freaked out because I was scared, vulnerable, and alone in a foreign country overseas quite literally, stranded with nowhere else to go.

I got freaked out, screamed, and *while barefoot* (from being in the middle of changing clothes in the pitch black darkness and having a "fight-or-flight" response) I walked barefoot over to the front desk hysterically asking what was going on, because I have emotions, and I’m only human. I didn’t know if they shut off the bathroom light/access at a certain hour (1 a.m.) to the public.

The front desk staff member was deadpan serious, reprimanding me for yelling in front of the guests in the check-in line. I didn’t mean to have an emotional response, but I was just alone and scared, and had no idea that what was going on. Again, I’m only human. During this “blackout”, everyone in the lobby had other humans around, and there was at least still *some* lighting in the lobby, unlike being trapped alone in the dark, black bathroom.

Rather than apologizing/saying sorry, she immediately barked at me for going hysterical around the guests in the check-in line. (I did apologize for this action of mine during our argument.) Again, I was overcoming a human “fight-or-flight” response. Instead of being empathetic or calming me down, she said that it was just an electrical malfunction “for only five seconds”. Putting it in those words, she belittled me about the issue rather than trying to offer empathy or real hospitality, in an actual hospitality establishment, a hotel. She kept arguing with me.

Afterwards, as I walked away, a guest and herself snickered. I was frustrated that she had kept arguing with me saying things like, “I was no longer a guest”, implying that it didn’t matter what I felt or thought.

As mentioned, I apologized for my own wrongdoing in this instance, but am I justified in feeling like the front desk staff were really rude and unempathetic that night?!

This has left a bitter taste in what was a great hotel stay beforehand. Not sure if this hotel will be my first choice now if I ever visit Barcelona again.