I’m not sure if I’m posting this rant or to ask for advice but I’m exhausted. Thankfully I’m on an early train home in the morning so the situation is coming to an end but here’s how my last two days have been.
On Friday me and another worker came to a different hotel linked to the one I am contracted at. We did this as a favour to this hotel as apparently they were short staffed and needed us. We are told by our manager to be there for 12pm Friday and we will be told everything from there once we arrive, so hours we’d be working and what food we get etc. of course, we get there on schedule and they weren’t expecting us so it takes twenty minutes to get us rooms.
We dump our bags in our rooms and are told to get straight into uniform and get to work. During this first shift which was 13 hours long we only got a 20 minute break in the staff smoking area, we got fed the food prepped for staff dinner as I hounded the person in charge about needing food. The only other food available to us was leftovers from the wedding. No lunch. No communication. No one directed us round the hotel or what we need to do, we were entirely winging it. Unpleasant shift but not the worst.
Second day. Today.
Meant to start shift at 2pm and it’s 12pm and suddenly neither me nor the girl I came with can access our rooms, the keycards stopped working. We go to reception and they tell us because there’s a busy wedding that has booked out the entire hotel that we can’t stay there and we have to pack our stuff immediately. They say they’ll book us a room at a different hotel down the road but would we mind sharing a room.
At this point we obviously get upset and contact our manager at our hotel, phone calls are exchanged, suddenly we can stay in our room until 2pm when our shift starts! Suddenly they can get us a room each! Still shit but I think my manager chewed them out.
We go about our shift from 2pm until finish. It’s eventful, I’m yelled at by staff members, it’s very unorganised. We’re asked to come back at 10am so we try to leave at 1am so that we can get our taxi and get to this other hotel they’re putting us up in, but the person in charge of this wedding is nowhere to be seen so we can’t tell them we’re leaving. There is no receptionist so we can’t access our bags which are locked in a cupboard. We don’t know which hotel they’ve booked for us nor any information about the booking so we can’t ring a taxi ourselves. It’s horrific and we eventually get in a taxi with our bags at 1:30am, at which point I’d cancelled the shifts for the next day as we were incredibly uncomfortable with how no one knew what to do with us and seemed to think of us as someone else’s problem.
We get to the hotel they’ve booked for us at 2am, it’s in the middle of nowhere, my friends phone is dead and mine is on 20%, no service no wifi, and apparently our rooms have been booked but not paid for so we can’t book in. We can’t call and ask someone to pay for it for us because there’s no signal. We won’t pay for it ourselves because we will not get the money back. We only end up getting the rooms because these workers take pity on us for being in this situation at 2am.
I’m not sure if I had the wrong expectations of working away but I believe they’re meant to make it appealing in some way. Either bonus money, free food, maybe gym or spa access. At the bare minimum I expected to be able to order food that would be comped by the hotel, and to be in a room for the duration of the stay. The fact they kicked us out and barely fed us and violated laws about breaks, yet were more than happy for us to work, it’s disgusting. To top it all off when we left, someone genuinely asked if we were coming back next weekend. As if it wasn’t clear by us returning home days early and cancelling shifts, no, that won’t be happening.
Does anyone have any advice on this situation. I’ve documented the whole thing. Kept receipts of trains and taxis to be reimbursed by my hotel. Am I being dramatic? Im told that this is just how hospitality is but I’m a grown woman, I’m 23 and I don’t think I should be treated this poorly.