The Customer Is Not Always Right

(an old post that I never finished, so my math is now off. whatever)

In fact, the customer is almost always wrong. Particularly when they try to insist they know the hotel better than I do. Look, lady, I may have only worked here three months (almost four now, actually), but I'm here 40 hours a week, as opposed to the two days you spent here last year. That means I've spent about a month of my life in this hotel. Seriously. 40 hours a week times about 16 weeks equals 640 hours. Divide that by 24 and you get ~27 days. Wow, that's depressing.

But anyway, this woman comes in for a business meeting being held at our hotel, and asks for a smoking room. I inform her that we don't have smoking rooms, but offer to put her near an exit. Best I can do. Well, she turns into a major bitch. She insists that we have smoking rooms, and says last year when she was here she had a smoking room. I pull up her previous reservation and there's no note about smoking. Plus, we're a completely non-smoking hotel.

Despite both myself and my coworker saying that we're non-smoking, she says we're wrong. We both repeat that the hotel is completely non-smoking and the fine is $250 for smoking in the room. She says she doesn't care. Then (since her company was paying for the room & tax), when I ask her for a credit card for incidentals, she tries to get out of giving me one. Uh-huh. You tell me you're going to smoke in the room and you think you're not giving me a credit card to charge when you do? No way. She says she's going to talk to the person in charge of her business meeting, since she knows she requested a smoking room for her.

When I told the GM about it that afternoon, he tells me that after all that, if she still smokes in the room, we'll throw her out and charge her $250 for each day she smoked. Ha! After being such a bitch, she would deserve it.

Ultimately, it didn't come to that. She spoke to the leader of her group, who spoke to our sales team and confirmed the hotel is non-smoking. And then she came by the desk and told me that the smoking hotel she stayed at last year was a different property, not ours (obviously).