Early check-in is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Don't get me wrong, if I have a room free and you come in early, you can have it. We don't make people wait till 3. But when people make a reservation, my hotel chain gives them to option to check early check-in as a request. This is a request. It's not guaranteed. Additionally, so many people check off this request and then don't come early that it's essentially useless. I usually ignore it unless the person has called in to request early check-in. And then there are the ones who do neither.
I checked in a woman last week. Comes up to the front at 11:30am.
Woman: Checking in.
Me: Your name? (she gives me her name, and I pull up her reservation. The room isn't ready, and since she's part of a wedding group I'm not moving her to a higher floor so the non-wedding guests can be disturbed at 2 in the morning. I look for other rooms on that floor, nothing). I don't have any rooms available just yet. I can check with housekeeping, hopefully I can have something ready in about an hour?
Woman: Well, why isn't the room ready now?
Me: Umm, check-in's at 3. I have housekeeping working on early check-in rooms (which I did, for people who had requested them), but we don't have you here as requesting an early check-in.
Woman: I didn't know I needed to request an early check-in!
Well, then how are we supposed to know you're coming early? I'm sorry, my psychic abilities aren't working today, try again tomorrow. Yesterday a woman (who had actually checked off that early check-in request) came in at 8:30am, and my manager fell all over herself apologizing that we didn't have any rooms available because we had sold out the night before. Don't be sorry, it's 8:30 in the morning! Check-out isn't even till noon!
I love it when people come in so early (before 12, I would say), and I go: Let me see what I have available. They think I'm talking about reservations, and say: No, I have a reservation. Me: Yes, I see that, but check-in's not till 3. Them: But I requested an early check-in.
Early check-in is never, ever, GUARANTEED! Especially if you have a request for connecting or side-by-side rooms. If you call to confirm your connecting request and I say we have one set of rooms in the hotel that can accommodate that, do not traipse in with five suitcases at 11am unless you've called to confirm. Because I can practically promise it won't be ready.
And don't even get me started on the people who won't give me the time they want (probably because it's ridiculously early and they know I won't do it), but instead turn it around on me. I originally wrote the below conversation as Joe Smith, but then changed it because it is invariably a woman who does this.
Jane: Hi, this is Jane Smith. I'm coming in this Friday, and wanted to request an early check-in.
Me: Okay, let me put in that request for you. What time did you want to arrive?
Jane: Well, what's the earliest time I can check-in?
For those who really want to know, I would consider an early check-in 12pm. Not before.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
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).
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).
And Counting!
54 days of work left to go!!! (yes, I am staring a countdown. I need to get out of this place.)
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Not Hotel-Related, But...
Who thinks that a valid excuse for doing poorly on an SAT practice test is: "There were lots of girls in the room and I couldn't concentrate"?
Not me!
Not me!
Sunday, May 1, 2011
I May Sound Like An Ass Here, But...
I'm smarter than my boss. She knows it and I know it. And it's not that I can't respect someone who's not as smart as me. Really, it's not. Especially if you consider that lesser intelligence in the context of more experience in this industry than I have. I consider that experience something I can learn from. After all, don't we all have new things we can learn? Of course we do. I love knowledge. The day I stop learning is the day I die. The problem is, she does not feel that way.
Each day, the morning shift at a hotel blocks guests into rooms. What this means is that we select a room for a guest based on their requests. Connecting rooms, high floor, first floor, quiet area, smoking (not permitted, so they go near an exit). We go through and block accordingly, based on that day's arrivals. However, for some reason our system was doing something very unfortunate in that it was automatically blocking rooms with no consideration to guest preferences. So my supervisor comes out one morning and asks if we are blocking according to requests. I say, yes, we are, and she asks why the rooms guests are currently in don't match their requests. Wellll, that would be because the system blocks automatically and I haven't gone through to fix it yet.
"What do you mean the system blocks automatically? That doesn't make any sense. Someone had to set that up."
I pull up the screen to show her, unblocking several rooms and showing her how the system automatically reblocks. Which she ignores
"That doesn't make any sense. The system doesn't do that."
She goes back into the office, and I ask my coworker what exactly there is to not understand. This isn't brain surgery. Her response: she doesn't want to understand.
I received similar responses from both my parents - apparently I am showing up my supervisor with my superior knowledge of the system, and she doesn't like it. But anyway, I go to the help for our system and figure out how to stop the automatic blocking. Then I tell the GM that I've stopped it. He lets my immediate supervisor know this, and she tells him that the morning shift haven't been responding to requests when rooms are blocked, and that's the problem with the blocking, nothing else.
I heard about this because someone else was in the back office at the time - I didn't hear it directly. And at first I shrugged it off, but the more I think about it, the more pissed off I am. How dare she tell my GM a flat-out lie about me, especially after I explained the problem to her and she decided she didn't want to understand? So I've decided to talk to him tomorrow. And I don't care if it makes her look bad. I'm not going to be here that much longer anyway!
***PS - I know I haven't been posting much lately. Nothing happened at work to make me feel this way, but I become paranoid about being caught. Fellow bloggers, how do you manage to stay anonymous and still tell specific stories about your job?
Each day, the morning shift at a hotel blocks guests into rooms. What this means is that we select a room for a guest based on their requests. Connecting rooms, high floor, first floor, quiet area, smoking (not permitted, so they go near an exit). We go through and block accordingly, based on that day's arrivals. However, for some reason our system was doing something very unfortunate in that it was automatically blocking rooms with no consideration to guest preferences. So my supervisor comes out one morning and asks if we are blocking according to requests. I say, yes, we are, and she asks why the rooms guests are currently in don't match their requests. Wellll, that would be because the system blocks automatically and I haven't gone through to fix it yet.
"What do you mean the system blocks automatically? That doesn't make any sense. Someone had to set that up."
I pull up the screen to show her, unblocking several rooms and showing her how the system automatically reblocks. Which she ignores
"That doesn't make any sense. The system doesn't do that."
She goes back into the office, and I ask my coworker what exactly there is to not understand. This isn't brain surgery. Her response: she doesn't want to understand.
I received similar responses from both my parents - apparently I am showing up my supervisor with my superior knowledge of the system, and she doesn't like it. But anyway, I go to the help for our system and figure out how to stop the automatic blocking. Then I tell the GM that I've stopped it. He lets my immediate supervisor know this, and she tells him that the morning shift haven't been responding to requests when rooms are blocked, and that's the problem with the blocking, nothing else.
I heard about this because someone else was in the back office at the time - I didn't hear it directly. And at first I shrugged it off, but the more I think about it, the more pissed off I am. How dare she tell my GM a flat-out lie about me, especially after I explained the problem to her and she decided she didn't want to understand? So I've decided to talk to him tomorrow. And I don't care if it makes her look bad. I'm not going to be here that much longer anyway!
***PS - I know I haven't been posting much lately. Nothing happened at work to make me feel this way, but I become paranoid about being caught. Fellow bloggers, how do you manage to stay anonymous and still tell specific stories about your job?
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Be Professional
I rarely write about my co-workers or managers on this blog. This is for two reasons: one, I am worried that one day one of them will stumble upon my blog and recognize descriptions of themselves and two, I likely most of the people I work with. There is one person I am not such a big fan, though. This would be my immediate supervisor, whose title will not be disclosed for reason #1 above.
I am normally the kind of person who gets along with everyone, but she irritates me. The reason for this? I hate liars. Hate hate hate. With a passion. In case you cannot tell, I am a very honest (read: blunt) person. And I consider hypocrites to be liars. And she is one of the biggest hypocrites I've ever met. And closed-minded.
When you talk to her, it's like there's only one acceptable attitude. One acceptable viewpoint. One acceptable way to do things. Any suggestions are shot down. I was talking about my old hotel the other day and she says, "You aren't there anymore, you're here. We're not them. We do things this way here." And yes, they were a less organized property, but that doesn't mean there's nothing that can be learned from them.
And then there's her personality - childish and unprofessional. It's really amazing that she's gotten to this point in her hotel career considering how incredibly petty she is. She is the type of person who holds grudges. And plays favorites. So when her favorite front desk person called out sick and the person who had to cover wasn't happy about it and spoke to the GM, she gave them the cold shoulder, then called them into her office and talked about how she doesn't play favorites. Uh huh. It's like, this is a business. Be professional. If you can't do that, go back to kindergarten and learn how to play nice with other people. It's gotten to the point that I really look forward to the days she's not there.
I am normally the kind of person who gets along with everyone, but she irritates me. The reason for this? I hate liars. Hate hate hate. With a passion. In case you cannot tell, I am a very honest (read: blunt) person. And I consider hypocrites to be liars. And she is one of the biggest hypocrites I've ever met. And closed-minded.
When you talk to her, it's like there's only one acceptable attitude. One acceptable viewpoint. One acceptable way to do things. Any suggestions are shot down. I was talking about my old hotel the other day and she says, "You aren't there anymore, you're here. We're not them. We do things this way here." And yes, they were a less organized property, but that doesn't mean there's nothing that can be learned from them.
And then there's her personality - childish and unprofessional. It's really amazing that she's gotten to this point in her hotel career considering how incredibly petty she is. She is the type of person who holds grudges. And plays favorites. So when her favorite front desk person called out sick and the person who had to cover wasn't happy about it and spoke to the GM, she gave them the cold shoulder, then called them into her office and talked about how she doesn't play favorites. Uh huh. It's like, this is a business. Be professional. If you can't do that, go back to kindergarten and learn how to play nice with other people. It's gotten to the point that I really look forward to the days she's not there.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Why America's Going Downhill
Yes, I know it's been a while since I've written. I've been pretty busy working 70-hour weeks and trying to choose a law school for next year (actually, I've decided. but for my father's sanity, i am "weighing my options"). But this guy's story just begged to be told.
He came in Sunday, and for whatever reason was booked in a suite. Probably because we were sold out this week. He came in Monday to ask about breakfast, but that's a whole different story in itself. So he's in a suite, and at first he tried feeding us this crap about how he "thought all the rooms were like that" and he "didn't realize he was in a suite". Riiight. So he wants a lower rate, but he doesn't want to change rooms. That's not happening. The afternoon shift yesterday tried to get in touch with him all evening, but he wasn't picking up. So guess who gets to deal with this guy when he finally gets all his messages? Me.
He called down this morning and said he didn't understand what the messages were saying. I pull up his reservation and recognize the booking - the guy who wants neither to move nor to pay. I tell him we'd be happy to move him into a new room, and he says that's what he wants. But he's running late and wants to know if housekeeping can move his things for him.
We're really not supposed to do that. No one from the hotel is supposed to move a guest's belongings because the hotel is liable if something is missing. But we've been trying to resolve this problem for a few days, and we've done it before, so I say yes, and tell him they'll move his belongings as long as everything's packed up.
Guest: "So they'll move my stuff for me?"
Me: "As long as everything's packed up, yes."
I repeated this because it was very important that everything be packed. Housekeeping won't/can't gather up and move toiletries, clothes, etc. Additionally, my tone was totally neutral as I said this. Sometimes I say something to a guest and wish later I'd phrased it a little more decorously. But going over it again, I wouldn't say anything differently. But apparently this struck a nerve.
Guest (nastily, in case anyone was thinking otherwise): "You just told me that. You don't have to tell me again. I heard you. And you don't have to be so rude about it."
Me (somewhat surprised on the other end): "I said it again because housekeeping can't move your belongings unless everything is packed."
Guest: "Then you should have said that instead of being so rude! This is why America's going downhill! Everyone in the service industry is so rude! No one knows good service anymore!"
And so on, with several more comments about how rude I was. I think he was hoping for an apology, but I refuse to apologize to such an asshole - especially over nothing. My coworker said I should have told him it was inappropriate to speak to me that way, and I should have, but at that point I was a little stunned. I don't think I've ever dealt with such a nasty, unreasonable guest.
And he thinks the service industry is leading America to its downfall? Methinks otherwise.
He came in Sunday, and for whatever reason was booked in a suite. Probably because we were sold out this week. He came in Monday to ask about breakfast, but that's a whole different story in itself. So he's in a suite, and at first he tried feeding us this crap about how he "thought all the rooms were like that" and he "didn't realize he was in a suite". Riiight. So he wants a lower rate, but he doesn't want to change rooms. That's not happening. The afternoon shift yesterday tried to get in touch with him all evening, but he wasn't picking up. So guess who gets to deal with this guy when he finally gets all his messages? Me.
He called down this morning and said he didn't understand what the messages were saying. I pull up his reservation and recognize the booking - the guy who wants neither to move nor to pay. I tell him we'd be happy to move him into a new room, and he says that's what he wants. But he's running late and wants to know if housekeeping can move his things for him.
We're really not supposed to do that. No one from the hotel is supposed to move a guest's belongings because the hotel is liable if something is missing. But we've been trying to resolve this problem for a few days, and we've done it before, so I say yes, and tell him they'll move his belongings as long as everything's packed up.
Guest: "So they'll move my stuff for me?"
Me: "As long as everything's packed up, yes."
I repeated this because it was very important that everything be packed. Housekeeping won't/can't gather up and move toiletries, clothes, etc. Additionally, my tone was totally neutral as I said this. Sometimes I say something to a guest and wish later I'd phrased it a little more decorously. But going over it again, I wouldn't say anything differently. But apparently this struck a nerve.
Guest (nastily, in case anyone was thinking otherwise): "You just told me that. You don't have to tell me again. I heard you. And you don't have to be so rude about it."
Me (somewhat surprised on the other end): "I said it again because housekeeping can't move your belongings unless everything is packed."
Guest: "Then you should have said that instead of being so rude! This is why America's going downhill! Everyone in the service industry is so rude! No one knows good service anymore!"
And so on, with several more comments about how rude I was. I think he was hoping for an apology, but I refuse to apologize to such an asshole - especially over nothing. My coworker said I should have told him it was inappropriate to speak to me that way, and I should have, but at that point I was a little stunned. I don't think I've ever dealt with such a nasty, unreasonable guest.
And he thinks the service industry is leading America to its downfall? Methinks otherwise.
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