Serious Privacy violation at Grand Hyatt Jakarta - What to do?
 

Hello all,

I've had an incident at the Grand Hyatt Jakarta and the hotel staff seem uncaring or a bit oblivious to the seriousness of this. So, I'm hoping I can get some advice from this group as to how I should escalate this. I'm a Globalist member, and I've stayed at this hotel either using cash or points at least 10-15 nights a year for the past three years.

During my last stay, a troublesome person I wish to avoid called the hotel at about 2am to enquire if I had checked in. The hotel confirmed when I arrived, and when I was checking out. This caused a significant amount of hassle for me which I won't get into. Suffice to say, my evening and remainder of stay there was ruined.

Now, I could understand "these things happen", except this is the second time it did happen. The same issue occured in December of 2017. At the time, the hotel manager assured me I would permanently be marked as "private/incognito" so that no one could ever call up to enquire about my status. Obviously this did not happen, or their process failed.

I raised my concern to the front desk staff, and they attempted to act concerned but obviously did not understand the significance of why this was a problem. I asked to speak with management, but only had contact back from another local manager in the hotel. I was offered 20% off of a night's stay in the future. Ha? Honestly, I'm not sure what I should expect or ask for, but this seems almost pathetically considering nightly room rate is sometimes as low as $135 USD.

Any advice or suggestions how or who i should escalate this issue to? I'm a globalist, so not sure if there is a special method there. A free night may be nice, but honestly I would rather be somehow convinced something is being done so this doesn't happen again.

And please. Let's not derail the thread with speculation about who or what this troublesome person is all about. It's probably not what you think, and it's not significant to my point. But yes, it did literally cause me to lose sleep, drastically change my agenda, and cause significant stress the next few days.

1. Complain to Hyatt. Make it clear that you have complained to the hotel and they did not take this seriously.

2. Don't go back

A reply I've used succesfully before when given a future discount is something in those lines:

"Given the distress I've experienced due to this pricacy violation and the apparent complete lack of understanding from customer support, please note that unless you take this matter seriously there will be no future stay from my part. Therefore the discount on a future stay does not constitute any form of valid or relevant compensation whatsoever and I would kindly ask that instead you at least........... "

Yeah good wording, thank you. I'm not quite sure what else I really want from them though. I'll see how they respond.

1 I just found a generic Hyatt feedback form for problems about a stay, and submitted it there. I'm hoping "corporate" takes it more seriously than the local hotel staff seem to. I filled out the post-stay survey pretty negatively and was only contacted back by someone local from that hotel.

2 Is harder, since it is a damn convenient location and price for everything I need when I go, but I'm looking for alternatives.

Whole thing sounds weird

I appreciate your situation, but to take a slightly different perspective, I don't think you can expect a hotel to be a shield for your problem with this person. Either it is serious or it isn't (and I'm not going to speculate beyond that). If it really is serious and you want to or have to stay in that hotel, then you should check in under a different name or come to an understanding with the hotel that you are logged as Mr X.

FD staff are basically minimum wage robots that have no say or control over anything. They were never going to give you a solution you wanted.
I don't think hotels should be so forthcoming with guest's check-in information. Even if the person calling said they were your spouse or mother, I feel that, they should decline to give any information period.

I would talk to the GM and stress these points. If he stonewalls me, then, plenty of other luxury hotel choices in Jakarta. Don't go back.

Well, thats a bit my point. It happened before, and I asked them what they could do so it wouldn't happen again. They offered to mark my profile as "private" so people couldn't just call and ask if i was there. But, they ignored it this last visit when i was there and someone did call.

This is a standard hotel offering, and something they said they did for me. It's not that I'm asking the hotel to help me avoid a specific person, but that I want my privacy respected where I'm staying. Do you think celebrities and such that travel allow random people to call the hotel and ask if they're there? Or, should hotel guest registries be public?

I'm just asking what the opinion is of this group (frequent travelers) when a hotel I've invested significantly in (Diamond/Globalist for years) gives me a problem like this. Who to raise it to: Corporate, the membership program, just ..... on every public review sites, etc.

Have you tried the GM? Someone on his staff made you promises that weren't kept and he should be the one refunding you or giving compensation.
What do you expect from corporate? 20000 points? 50000 points? I think you're just going to get a generic apology from whatever executive you manage to get ahold of. You should just change hotels to MO, FS or Keraton. I bet the first two would be more discrete.

We're saying the same thing, but your expectations are too high. As Aventine says, these people are not highly paid or trained, and probably have no appreciation for what you want to achieve. Many celebrities are registered under false names for precisely that reason; no one will make an association. I had a long conversation with the former GM of the Adlon Hotel in Berlin (which gets a lot of world leaders and celebrities) and he told me some interesting stories about how they handle people who don't want to attract any attention, and the first thing is to mark them in under a dummy name. I think the only thing you can do is impress this (again) on the GM.

Anyone who has access to customer information has an obligation to keep it private.

When someone calls and asks a question like that, the only acceptable answer is "I'm sorry, we don't give out that information".

That is just standard. It has nothing to do with high expectations.

This is not a language barrier issue. Hotel staff in non-english-speaking countries are not less intelligent than they are in the US. You should not have lower expectations of them.