if you're going to break our rules and steal from us (theft of service)...

[katzklaw]

at least try not to do it in plain view of the 2 people working in the office. dumb@$$

woman comes in the office today and asks about the jumping pillow. tell her it's $3.75. She seems surprised and says "I'm camping here. It's still a charge?" "Yes Ma'am." she mutters something about our prices being way high and upcharge for everything and walks out the door. about 20-30 minutes later my co-worker notices her out on the jumping pillow with her kid. it's a slow day, so we watch, amused, for about 10-15 minutes while she jumps for free, then she went out for a band check and to tell a couple older boys to stop doing flips. woman and kid are the only ones without bands. they leave. not 5 minutes after my co-worker comes back in the office, she's out there again with her kid again. co-worker chased her off again. she was smart enough not to try for round 3 at least.

[WishfulSpirit]

Should have added the charge to her credit card. Btw some hotels use RFID tags to track linens and can charge guests who swipe them. This gives me a sick form of pleasure even though we don't do that.

[EricKei]

You don't have to actually HAVE RFID tags if the guests are ...somehow....convinced that the easily-stealable items have REALLY well-hidden tags...Just sayin'.

[Silent-Hunter]

I don't even see why you need tags. If the guest is registered to that room and a linen is missing, who else could have taken it?

[ronin8879]

I think this is referring to a bounce house, not an actual sleeping-on-in-bed pillow.

[katzklaw]

well, i don't know what site she was on, or i would have considered it. she may have even been lying about being a guest because her kid DID have a band on, but not the color for the pillow... the band she had on was a color that we normally only put on outside guests who buy a pool/slide combo. meh. who the heck knows.

[WishfulSpirit]

I don't even see why you need tags. If the guest is registered to that room and a linen is missing, who else could have taken it?

The technology was actually developed for use by send-out laundry services to make tracking what linen belonged to what client easier, and for hotels to make sure they got back what they sent out. Higher-end places sometimes use it to track expenses related to theft vs what just wears out (an alert is sent when a towel crosses a specific threshold, for example).

Some hotels (especially those who do their laundry in house) do actually use a lower-tech system (called "counting" lol). They track how many towels were issued to a room vs how many housekeeping returned to laundry and the guest is charged if there is a difference. We don't do that since our towels aren't high enough quality to make them attractive as theft targets and the percentage of revenue we lose from theft is so small that it isn't worth the time and effort to track it. Some of the hotels in our brand do track that, though.

[EricKei]

ronin - OP was referring to a bouncy house -- WS was referring to hotel pillows. So...I guess you're both right ^_^

Welcome to CS, by the way!

[WishfulSpirit]

Yes both things they steal!

[wordgirl]

I actually ratted someone out for something like katzlaw described. The hotel we were staying in had cute little paddle boats for rent. The dock was just outside the lobby and when I was checking in I saw a couple of boats returning to the dock and an employee ran out and explained to the family that they hadn't been able to catch them before they took the boats out, but that there was actually a charge to use them... Since the family didn't know, the clerk wasn't going to charge them, but she wanted them to understand that the boats weren't free.

The next afternoon, I was on my way back from lunch and saw the same family gathered in the hall just outside the lobby. One of the kids came running up and reported that there was a different clerk on duty. It wasn't difficult to figure out what they were up to (planning on playing the "we didn't know" card again) ... so I turned around, went up to the desk and clued the clerk in. I didn't really bother to hide what I was doing, so the family knew they were busted. I got some very heated glares, but they turned around and headed back to the pool (which sucked, because I had been thinking about going to the pool myself, but I hate cheaters more than I love chlorinated water, so )

[wolfie]

Wordgirl, any chance of getting information about the paddle boats NOT being free added somewhere that the guests can't "not see it", for example a notice about the rental charge on the reg card (which guest has to sign before they get their room), on a sign at the foot of the dock (so they have to pass it to get to the boats), or on the boats themselves where it would be visible to the operator? That should get rid of the "I didn't know" excuse, and for anyone getting caught have the rental billed to their room.

Katzlaw, since that family asked about the jumping pillow, was told there was a charge, and then proceeded to use it without paying, why weren't they kicked out, forfeiting (with no refund) the privileges associated with the bands they already had?

[katzklaw]

because i didn't know what (if any) site they were actually on (they may have lied to me about camping there. they had a band normally only given to non-campers), and the boss, while not a pushover by any stretch of the imagination, is not enough of a hard@$$ to throw someone out over a $3.75 jumping pillow fee. typically you have to be abusive, causing big trouble, or stealing something a bit more major to get thrown off this park.

they wandered away around the building so we lost track of where they were after that... have no idea if they left, or if they went back to the site they may or may not have had... i never saw them the rest of the weekend

[wordgirl]

Wordgirl, any chance of getting information about the paddle boats NOT being free added somewhere that the guests can't "not see it", for example a notice about the rental charge on the reg card (which guest has to sign before they get their room), on a sign at the foot of the dock (so they have to pass it to get to the boats), or on the boats themselves where it would be visible to the operator? That should get rid of the "I didn't know" excuse, and for anyone getting caught have the rental billed to their room.

It's been a few years but I just checked a *certain site* and there was a photo of the dock taken about a year after I was there and it had a sign saying "See front desk to arrange rental or make a reservation through (in-room service)." I remember knowing that they were rented because the conference package we had actually included a few hours' rental of a boat or a trail ride.

It was a nice resort (basically, the ideal place to be a conference plus-one, because there was plenty I could do to amuse myself but also a fantastic place to just chill with a book and relax) but the way they did things, with a large variety of amenities that were a la carte but could also be included in various packages in various configurations, made me think that there was a lot of opportunity for people to take things they weren't entitled to. Some things like spa services you needed vouchers for, but other things, like breakfast, they just basically took your word for it. I actually had a three-hour one-on-one archery lesson that I had to remind them a few times to charge me for. (So yeah, looking back there was a good reason to think they could have done some things better. I was surprised that a service like a lesson, which presumably they are paying the teacher for, was not accurately billed especially since it was booked through the in-room reservations system. )