You know you're in for a great night when you come on shift and are greeted by the duty receptionist saying:-
'Evening! Welcome to Hell!'
This particular sentiment was brought about through our reservations department accidentally dropping us in it.
The story goes that at 9am when the duty reservationist came in, she loaded up our availability sheets for the day and found that we'd taken a few too many reservations... 7 to be precise. Now, unless we can magically conjure up an additional 7 rooms, we need to get rid of 7 bookings. Throughout the course of the day, they had managed to bring this down to 1, but 1 is still a problem.
When I came on shift we still had 3 arrivals to come, with only 2 rooms available. I had a brief chat with the duty manager, who explained that they'd called another hotel which had 3 rooms available, but the rate was £189. This is a touch expensive, and if we send a guest to them we will have to pay the difference. If we book the room, and a guest doesn't show up, we would have to pay regardless. I decided that, based on the hour, hopefully one of our arrivals would be a no-show and we'd chance it. On average we get about 10 no-shows a week, so this seemed possible...
Irritatingly, they all turned up. Even more annoyingly, when I rang the other hotel to let them know that we would indeed be needing one of their rooms, I was informed that they were full.
This, was a lie.
I know this was a lie because we had spoken to them just an hour before and the hotel is in such a remote location that they aren't going to get 3 walk-ins in that space of time.
To add to my mood, finding out that they were 'full' took me 10 minutes because the night manager at the hotel is apparently French, and her English is awful.
To further my frustration, I called 3 other hotels before I finally found one that wasn't 'full' and by this point had spoken to a French night manager, an Indian, a Spaniard, and possibly a Pole. Don't misunderstand, I have absolutely nothing against foreigners coming to work in this country. However, I find it infuriating when people are in positions that require a high level of English speaking ability, and all I can get out of them is 'Sorry', 'Yes', and 'No'. My guest in the mean time has had to wait half an hour whilst I struggle through these conversations.
Anyway, to cut a long story short I eventually found my guest a room in another hotel, and arranged for the remainder of their stay at our hotel to be in our best suite. This seemed to appease them and they complimented and gave a good review to me when checking-out. The hotel itself got a complaint for causing the problem in the first place, but it could be worse...
For example, one day we were 13 overbooked...
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4 comments:
I would have thought it fairly difficult to overbook at all. Are you using a computer based system and if so why doesn't it just stop when you become full rather than allowing more reservtions to be entered?
I have a feeling it's probably not quite as simple as that though.
It is a computer based system, but it doesn't however have an automatic cut-off system that won't let you overbook.
Part of the reason is that we deal with a lot of company bookings. Some companies have a number of rooms allocated to them each month. Whether they use them or not is up to them. In the mean time, it becomes very difficult to determine exactly how many are staying in the hotel on a given night...
...that, and our reservationists are idiots.
I used to do front desk reception years ago (no computer system when I was there) and occasionally we'd overbook. It was particularly annoying for me since I was the weekend night receptionist and it was usually me that had to deal with it!
Haha that's nothing, our Reservation Manager forgot to lock out the internet sites one weekend and so by Monday we were overbooked by 35 rooms!! On top of that it was high season and so many other Hotels were full as well, we ended up sending people to about 11 different Hotels. Boy did we get panned for that.
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