2 losers in one night

[figgyx]

I work midnights at a small 60 room hotel. One Saturday night (last weekend) we were sold out due to a big festival in town.

The first dude came in around 1am and asked for a room and when he found out we had no rooms he asked me to call him a cab (like it is my job to find him a ride) I called several companies but we are a small town and most of the cabs won't pick up here. Keep in mind he is asking to go home to the next biggest town to us. He asks me if there are any other hotels close by and I tell him no. He gets on his phone and promptly asks me why I lied. (huh?) apparently a hotel in said town 8 miles from us is close by and he yells at me that I should have informed him of said hotel. I try and tell him that it would not occur to anyone to do so when he was heading that way home anyway - and 8 miles is not close by.
After being in my lobby for over an hour he finally leaves.

The next dude walked in at 4am. Since I was still sold out I had to inform him of such. After asking me several more times (like phrasing it differently would magically change my answer) he asks me to also call him a cab. I am still having trouble finding cabs and the whole time I am on the phone he is repeating his questions. He even told me if he goes on line and finds a room I will be in trouble. OMG he would not shut up.

[bhskittykatt]

He even told me if he goes on line and finds a room I will be in trouble.

If. Like, how is that a threat when you know he'll go online and not find a room?

It's like we don't want to sell rooms and make money and are trying to run our motels out of business. Such is the logic of these people.

[earl colby pottinger]

So What?

While it can be considered good customer service, IT IS NOT YOUR JOB to know what competing hotels have rooms available.

The only time you should get in trouble if if it is another branch of your own hotel chain.

As for the first guy, if he had a phone why did he not just call his own cab. What a waste of time.

[MrSmiley]

Some online I've seen won't even show the rooms that are available because... you know... it's after midnight and the website bounces to arrival date of the next day, even though the people working behind the desk are still dealing with the night before mentally.

Which of course leads to the fun event of someone going tap tap tap on their phone, making a booking, trying to wave it in front of the desk clerk's face only to be told they need to look at the date of the reservation they just made. Which of course then leads to arguments about "midnight" being the new day and so it's perfectly reasonable to evict sleeping guests at this time to make way for new ones.

[bhskittykatt]

While it can be considered good customer service, IT IS NOT YOUR JOB to know what competing hotels have rooms available.

When I worked at the motel, I knew the names of a lot of other desk clerks in town b/c we would all call each other on busy nights to try and keep track of how many rooms were left throughout the city. (We saved each other time by swapping lists of who we found had rooms and who was definitely sold-out.)

Sometimes there were no rooms left for a 1 hour or more radius around town.

I would get guests in my lobby demanding that I call other motels/hotels even though I explained I already called them, all of them, and what I could refer them to was the best it was going to get. I promise they haven't magically had more inventory become available in the last 30 minutes since I called them (and if they did, they're probably keeping it to themselves for the guests who wander into their lobby on a night like that). I'm not making the effort again to try and find something I already know isn't there...

[Captain Trips]

apparently a hotel in said town 8 miles from us is close by and he yells at me that I should have informed him of said hotel.

He should try pulling that shit here in San Diego during Comic-Con His definition of "close by" will become 60 miles at the least. (I had friends once have to go 80 miles to find a room, and that was before Con started selling out.)

[wolfie]

I believe I read it here on CS, but apparently some hotel chain's rewards program allows their top tier members to "bump" other reservations if the property they're trying to book at is sold out. Imagine the fun for the front desk clerk when a guest who's made a reservation shows up (when the entire city is sold out) and finds out that they no longer have a reservation because someone with the Super Elite Asshole membership tier "bumped" them - especially if they don't have a smartphone (i.e. no e-mail while in transit) and it happened after they left the last place that they had e-mail access.

[MoonCat]

I was at a con once that had the misfortune of being near some kind of water treatment problem. The city had called in a bunch of experts and the hotel (corporate I'm guessing) had to bump con guests for these water treatment folks. To another hotel. Thing is, they were bumping the people who had made their reservations the earliest, instead of the most recent ones. People who had made their reservations months ago were being sent to another hotel some distance away from the con, while those who had made their reservations at the last minute kept them. Seemed wrong to me.

[taxguykarl]

If I was getting bumped from posh suite to warzone flophouse, I think some kind of compensation would be reasonable (e.g. refund the difference). The other way around at no extra charge would be great as well.

[earl colby pottinger]

No where close

When I worked at the motel, I knew the names of a lot of other desk clerks in town b/c we would all call each other on busy nights to try and keep track of how many rooms were left throughout the city. (We saved each other time by swapping lists of who we found had rooms and who was definitely sold-out.)

Sometimes there were no rooms left for a 1 hour or more radius around town.

At one time the computer store I worked at was the only Authorized Apple Dealer/Repair Center in our region (our competition moved and no-one else move in for a year) and the nearest other Centers were in Toronto.

That was over thirty miles away and in traffic that could easily add two to three hours on the round trip. It was amazing to see people demanding we tell them of a local repair center because we told them it would take 24-48 hours to repair their machines. And we would point out the other dealers were in Toronto.

The problem was we were only allowed to use Apple parts for repairs so we *ALWAYS* had to order Apple parts for repairs, thus the earliest we got a part was the following morning.

Second, if it was a warranty repair it had to be at an Authorized Dealer or you had to pay thru the nose for a repair.

Clue cat butt faces or complaining about how important they were and they needed done NOW!

[gerund]

Clue cat butt faces or complaining about how important they were and they needed done NOW!

Back in the 1980s I was a Tandy Color Computer repairman in the far north of Queensland Australia. Now I was doing most of it for a hobby as Color Computers were a small home system - 32 Kbs of memory, programs loaded from a tape player and the only outside communications was with a Tandy modem that did a maximum of 1200/1200 Bps. I used to make a serial cable to connect the computer to this modem so home users could connect to a Videotex service that was Australia only. It was called Viatel.

There was one user who got the cable and Videotex program from me after buying the computer and modem from the local Tandy store. This was in a town that was less that 100,000 people - so over 2 or 3 years I think I sold about 10 of these packages (perhaps less).

So there was a giant thunderstorm one night as often happened in the tropics. This user lived up the side of a hill and lightning travelled over 15,000 feet to meet his modem. The last 6 inches inside the modem vaporised tracks on the circuit board. Who knows what it did to components.

Needless to say it had to go 2,700 Kms (1700 miles) approx to Sydney in New South Wales for repairs. There were no repairmen locally who would have understood what a modem was, let alone be able to repair it to circuit board level. My understanding of any electronic equipment extended to replacing boards, pushing chips back into sockets and re-soldering broken joints. There is no way (in those days) that anyone local could repair anything like this modem.

So off to Sydney it went. Here's the point of my story - the customer was livid that he could not look up his stock prices on Viatel for a week or so and complained to me that it was amazing to him that Tandy did not have a local repairman on standby to fix his broken modem.

No matter what I explained to him, he seemed to think that his modem should be repaired instantly and returned to him the next day. And it should not cost him anything either. It should be able to withstand a lightning strike.

[hotelnpa]

My hotel was sold out during an event and the only hotel that had availiability was a lower end type of a place. This one guy demanded that I find him a room so I gave him directions to the place.

We then called corporate to complain about me. He said the parking lot wasn't full (there were several teams staying at the time and they arrived in buses) so I was lying about being sold out. Then he complained about the hotel I sent him to. Can't win whatever you do.