Universal constants...

[eris esoteric]

1. Front Desk Clerks cannot change printer toner catridges.

2. Hotel guests do not understand the concept of "central reservations," whether it is present or not.

3. Restraurant Servers cannot safely handle staplers.

[eris esoteric]

... almost forgot...

4. It does no good to worry about people who call for directions while in transit, because they will never actually stop by the front desk, and so you will never know which state they ended up in, even if they are just calling on the way back to the hotel from the restaurant down the block.

[eris esoteric]

5. Adding machines are to be feared, and only used with the utmost trepidation. And the setting must always be changed from A to annoy the night auditor, who is an adding machine snob and so deserves what she gets.

6. There is always a spreadsheet. No matter how advanced or antiquated your Property Management System, there is always at least one department who cannot understand the information it puts out until it has been presented to them in an Excell spreadsheet.

[eris esoteric]

7. Magnetic keys can be erased by cellphones. Everyone carries a cellphone in their pocket these days. Magnetic keys can also be erased by credit cards. Most people staying in hotels (at least the sort I work at) have multiple credit cards in their wallets. This means that the two most convenient places to keep a room key will demagnetize the key. This is a security feature.

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

What's "central reservation"?

[emeleel]

Yeah, what MJ said.

[mtomm[$]]

emeleel said

Yeah, what MJ said.

My first thought, too!

[eris esoteric]

You know, those 800 numbers you call to make reservations with chain hotels.

[mtomm[$]]

2. Hotel guests do not understand the concept of "central reservations," whether it is present or not.

We proved you right!

[lynnzop[$]]

As a frequent traveler who uses all kinds of methods of reservation: central 800 number, expedia/travelocity/etc., online hotel res service, call the hotel directly, it shouldn't matter to me where I call - the service should be transparent.

I'd like to know a little more from your side of the desk what you mean by #2.

[eris esoteric]

You say transparent, but what you mean is "magic."

I've worked in hotels that don't have central resevations. They have an 800 number. That number calls the front desk. This astounds people. Even people who are calling the hotel KNOWING that it isn't a national chain. Somehow, if you call an 800 number, you should be calling a bunker in, oh, I don't know, Omaha somewhere.

I've worked in hotels that do have central reservations. Two of them, maybe a third of the hotel's business was generated that way. Hotel gives national a chunk of rooms, says "sell these, we sell the rest." Guest calls national, makes a reservation. Guess what? That reservation does not magically show up in the hotel's system at that exact moment. It takes time.

The hotel I'm working at now has reservations COMPLETELY done by central reservations. If your reservation isn't for three days from now, it's not in our system, it's in central's. That's just the way it works. You know why? Because if we tried to load all the data into our PMS, our PMS would blow up, and I'd spend a comfortable evening toasting marshmallows at the desk. (Scenario three actually prompted comment number 2. I wasn't annoyed with the guy the first time I explained this to him last week. I wasn't even annoyed with him this week when I had to explain it again. It's more the understanding that I'll probably have to explain it to him every week for as long as I work at the hotel that's frustrating.)

Internet reservations... now there's a nightmare. Basically, the hotel sells rooms to the internet sellers. The internet sellers do not have access to our computers. The internet sellers sell the rooms to you. This is not an instantaneous process. The fact that you have made this reservation over *gasp* the internet! does not mean it's magic. Heck if you make your reservation over the weekend, it may actually take longer to show up ANYWHERE AT ALL than making your reservation directly.

[lynnzop[$]]

Okay, but as a guest, none of that matters. At 10 p.m. when I show up for my room that was reserved with late arrival guarantee and it's not there, I don't want to be given an explanation of central reservations. I just want my room. I don't care about the hotel's behind the scenes reservation process(es), and I don't want to hear about it. The shortfalls of those internal processes shouldn't be my problem.

That's Customer Service 101, IMO. Companies should not let their own process faults impact their customers. To me, the customer, it should be transparent, it should be magic.

(I appreciate your educating us on the behind the scenes stuff, but want you see to the "other side" as well. )

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

What Lynn said.

[sleeper54]

...
...smalllol...

I am not 'feeling the loving' here at all. . ..


...tom...
' who reserves very infrequently and thus has not suffered the pain of confirmed reservations that . . .aint. '

[sleeper54]

...
...and I also thought the thread was going to be about the 'speed of light' and Planck's constant' and 'pi' and stuff like that. Wrong subforum I guess . . ..


...tom...
.

[eris esoteric]

Guys, I'm not talking about letting our processes inconvenience the guest. I'm talking about the guest expecting magic. There IS a difference.

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

What magic is the guest expecting? No offense meant, I really want to know - why shouldn't a guest expect that if they make a reservation on the Internet that the hotel would know about it pretty soon after the confirmation screen pops up?

[eris esoteric]

Because the hotel doesn't know about the reservation until Priceline or whichever faxes the hotel the reservation information that night. And the reservation won't be entered in the computer until the reservationist comes in in the morning. Or on Monday morning if you make your reservation on a weekend.

No, Priceline does NOT have access to our computers.

If Priceline sells you a room on Saturday, for that Saturday, that room is there for you to rent (unless a whole series of other things has gone horribly wrong, which are becoming more unlikely as the technology is improving). Priceline isn't going to tell you that when you go to check in, you should tell the clerk that you made your reservation today so the clerk can enter your information in the computer... because if Priceline tells you that, you're going to wonder what you need Priceline for (which, by the way, you should generally be wondering in the first place.)

Again, I'm not really expecting the guest to know everything about how the hotel works, any more than I'm expecting a desk clerk to understand how an adding machine works. As the thread title says, I'm simply noting universal constants. Things that are the same at all seven of the hotels that I've worked at, in eleven years of doing this, in spite of how very different all these hotels have been.