Going along with a guest’s cheeky sense of humour just might have netted a local hotel a giant PR boost.

As of Thursday morning, almost a million people had viewed a series of photos uploaded by a guest at the Fairmont Hotel in Winnipeg Wednesday. The user, identified as InGordWeTrust on photo sharing site Imgur, said on the site when he booked the room, he asked for a pre-made pillow fort and two vanilla cokes under the “special requirements” section.

Staff at the hotel provided him with instructions on how to build a fort, several extra pillows and blankets, a basket of free goodies and a coupon good for two of the requested drinks, made from scratch by the hotel staff.

The man, Gordon Relph, documented the gesture, uploading several pictures, including two pictures of himself with a smile on his face and photos of the fort he constructed.

It quickly spread.

“We’ve got a remarkable team here at the hotel,” said Jacques Laverene, spokesperson for the Fairmont Winnipeg.

“Oddly enough, this isn’t a one off – we deal with an interesting mix of clientele here and we get some pretty off-the-wall requests. It’s part of the culture here at the hotel.”

Relph, 26, said he was taken aback by the attention.

“Obviously I never thought it would take off like this,” said Relph from an office in Winnipeg, where he’s in town on business until Friday.

The Kelowna-born Calgarian said he’s never made this kind of request from a hotel and was surprised when staff complied. “I thought, well, let’s just do it.”

Originally, Relph said he planned the post only for friends on Facebook, but decided to share it on Reddit when his friend urged him to. It took off from there, he said.

Relph said he used the fort and even slept on the floor all night.