Originally Posted by
Boraxo
At 3:30am today P2 arrived at the HGI Madison (after a harrowing journey that will be summarized elsewhere) only to be advised that "the system is down" so they were unable to check her into a room. I should note that I called the property at 10pm local time time to advise of the late arrival, and was told "no problem, we will hold her room". She ended up waiting at least an hour in the lobby for a room assignment. AFAIK this was not a situation where the room was cancelled or oversold. I received a text but don't yet have other details.
What would you request as appropriate comp?
My view is that this is the equivalent of a "walk" as the hotel did not provide a room as agreed when she arrived. So I think the day manager should comp the night plus add some points or cash. I tried a search but did not find any prior threads.
PS If it was me I would have probably asked the clerk to start calling other local properties (there are several HH nearby) to find a room. Fortunately I was not awak or I would have gone ballistic with the property. Also I'm wondering why they could not just use a master key to get in the room (assuming it was assigned) and deal with the paperwork the following day. Or if this was a scheduled outage they could have coded a key in advance (I've seen this at other properties). Welcome any other thoughts on how you would have handled the situation or how it could have been prevented.
A few points:
How it may have been prevented would have been when you called the hotel, ask them to check the room in at the time you're calling. Verify whatever they want: name of the guest actually staying, your HH number-card number-whatever. Tell them you're ok with the card on the reservation being charged regardless and that they should just have the keys waiting regardless of check in time. Usually properties are fine with that. Where I work, we do this all the time.
They couldn't use a master key because they probably didn't know what room was assigned. If the "system was down" (multiple possibilities - possibly night audit running but that does not take an hour - more like 8-15 minutes tops) and they didn't print the Downtime Reports (a series of reports that should be printed every shift and in theory you could run the hotel from like it's 1799 for a while in case of a power/system outage), the auditor likely wouldn't remember/know what room was assigned and/or do not assume every hotel gives every shift/all staff master key access. You would be surprised.
Is this a walk? No. Is it a huge service recovery failure? Yes. If you were awake, would you going ballistic at whomever was working mattered? Probably not. If it were me and it were a legit system outage that I had no control of, you would get hung up on and/or get a BS run around and then the GM would dig in their heels. Ballistic almost never yields results. Been there and done that.
What should they do? No hotel is giving out cash for this or really for anything. They should comp the night and maybe you're talking 10-20K points. But a lot of places (I know because I work at one) believe in you can get the comp or points but not both regardless of situation and especially if local management feels the issue is beyond their control. I don't agree with that, but you should go in with low expectations and hope for the best.