I just started a new job in the event planning part of the hotel:
- The car show is coming to town and our valets keep losing keys. One online review describes a guest busting their car out of the valet with a spare key (when our valet took too long/lost their key). If the customer has to bust their own car out, shouldn't we be able to tell? We're already getting calls about if cars will be safe in our lot during fancy pants car show week. This show goes on for a week and it's a huge deal. We charged the guy a $120 valet fee who had to bust out his own car. Nobody seems to think 150 classic cars etc. coming over is a huge deal. The teenage boys out front get to drive these collector's items.
- We're pet friendly and one guest found dog poo poo in the hallways three times. They wrote about it online. I brought this to my superior's attention (because of the poo) and the response was, “We have people to handle that.” UHHHH handle it before it hits the Internet. This same superior asked for feedback on how to get more people to book. M'AM.
- The lobby bathroom is having a septic issue. Frequently, you walk in and it looks like the airport bathroom in there. Engineering's response was, “it's a known problem.”
- Our fancy reservation system is broken. It never says the right rates so you go to our website to get the right rates and manually put them into the reservation. I watched a reservationist add up a bunch of different packages on paper for a guest. The rates change from day to day as well. So the guest sat on hold for a good ten minutes while somebody chicken scratched a bunch of nonsense out. Apparently, we are three upgrades behind with the fancy software.
- I had coffee one morning near one of our conventions. The client was handing back the plates to the kitchen because they were dirty. This was for a Fortune 500 company.