Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
01 02 2007
Perhaps someone could generously point me in the direction of a hotel that does not screw up the little things constantly. I've been over in Romania for the last week, staying in the Novotel, Bucharest and as a result of business I've had to extend my stay by one night.
Firstly, for some reason known only to the hotel staff themselves, that meant I had to pay some chunk of the bill last night, despite me not checking out until tomorrow. Fine. I handed over my credit card. After twenty minutes of mucking about with the various array of credit card machines (I counted three) the helpful girl suggested that she ring the bank regarding my credit card, as it was being refused without explanation. One phone call later she revealed that my card was fine but that the machines (all of them?) were broken. Normally I would not have minded this little charade, but it left me with approximately 2 minutes to get to the 7th floor, change clothes and rejoin my colleague in the lobby, from whence we were off to another office to continue our 18 hour work day.
Today, I arrived back to the hotel at about 9pm (EET) to discover that my keycard no longer unlocked my room. Imagine the situation - I'm tired; I've just returned from 12 hours in a customer's office and I cannot get into my room. Back to reception and an equally helpful girl explains that perhaps I should not keep my keycard near my mobile phone. I stopped short of explaining that maybe they should reprogram the keycard systems when people extend their stays. Perhaps their security system is broken, along with their impressive array of non-functional credit card machines...
Finally, to put the icing on the cake, I discover that my internet connection has expired. Great! In fairness, the internet connectivity here is good (far more reliable than any home ADSL type connection I've tested in Ireland.) Still, would it have killed them to extend it? By the time I discovered I could no longer get online I had removed my shoes and settled on the couch with my laptop. I rang the front desk and yet another helpful girl suggested that I could come down to the front desk to get a username and password. I requested that she read it out to me and hinted that I was probably not going to be in a good mood if they forced me to trek down 7 floors again. In fairness, after a pregnant pause she suggested that a bell-boy could bring it up.
Don't get me wrong - this hotel seems very nice. The food is reasonable, the location is perfect for where I'm working at the moment and would be great to see Bucharest city centre, if I only had the time. The room service is prompt and friendly and the food reasonable. If only these hotels could remember that I'm here to work - and my employer is paying a premium so that I can do so and don't have to worry about anything else. These little niggles have thus far wasted a total of over an hour that I really could have spent working. In fairness, it's also annoyed me enough to make me take 20 minutes to write this blog entry.
My inconveniences at this hotel are not an isolated incident. Almost every hotel I've been to has had issues with credit card authorisation, problems with internet access, getting bookings wrong or losing them altogether (in one case suggesting that I had faxed and cancelled my own reservation, despite their inability to produce said fax when I requested it), completely failing to handle something as commonplace as extending a stay, providing a room not matching the type reserved, and many other little irritations that take time and effort to sort out. If these were at cheap hotels, I might be prepared to look the other way - but they are generally not. Perhaps if they got things right first time, and wasted less of their own staff time fixing things and having to deal with irate clients, they could economise and bring prices down... just a thought :-)
Come on hotel people - get it right!
</rant%gt;
posted at: 21:57 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
