Originally Posted by
The Road Goes On Forever
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.
Appreciate this advice and makes sense if I am already calling the hotel. Of course this situation was somewhat rare one-off (multi-hour system-wide outage). So I'm not sure I would want to go to the trouble every time I have a late arrival (which is quite often, actually, flying eastbound).
Originally Posted by
The Road Goes On Forever
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.
Yes that was my assumption. But no procedures for a power failure, system down, etc? This is not like Vegas where MGM was hacked.
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Originally Posted by
The Road Goes On Forever
s 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.
Agree 100% - which is why I'm glad I wasn't awake! But it seems to me a reasonable conversation with the day manager - with pointed questions - is certainly not out of order at this point. In the past when I've had significant service failures - even when not the fault of the hotel - I've always found management is amenable to providing comp - waived parking, waived resort fees, points, etc. And none of them were as bad as waiting in the lobby for 2 hours at 3am. Even my Pointe Noire hotel was able to find someone to open my room (and switch me to another room) when my key malfunctioned and they couldn't code a new key.