While smokers caused immense trouble to the hotel staff, helping guests in times of crisis gets the writer “the employee of the month” award. The 45th part of a series describing the unknown triumphs and travails of doing international business

Our motto was to keep the customer happy in every manner possible, as long as their actions did not violate any law. Very often, however, we had our guests stretching our patience in generally violating the rule of smoking in non-smoking rooms. This act, as one can realize, leaves a bad odour all over the suite, and it takes a great amount of time, energy and expense to clean other items in the suite, down to curtains and special cleaning of carpets. Bed linen was cleaned every day, and some ‘considerate’ smokers used to enjoy their smoke in the balcony (which were in some suites), and yet, the smell would travel to the main suite and smell bad.
 
At the first sign of trouble like this, we would endeavour to get them shifted to smoking area, if suites are readily available; if not, request them to refrain from smoking and warning them that they would be subject to a special cleaning charge of $100; and also, they would have to move to suites in the designed floor at the first opportunity.
 
Overbooking the capacity was a regular feature in those days, but there were occasions when due to series of unfortunate and unexpected events created huge problems not only for us but to most other establishments. This covered the first problem arising out of bad weather locally that results in cancellation of all flights. This would also mean that flights cannot land as well and trouble starts when there is a mis-match of these figures. Also, many guests who had checked out early in the day, found themselves in difficulty, because the weather turned bad in the afternoon!  On the top of these, we had the situation where our airports were functioning normally but weather conditions at the arrival points (ports) were bad and so flights could not take off from our city!  Bad weather has a domino effect on this industry.
 
Then, of course, the issue is the overbooking by sales results in our need to ‘walk’ our guests, or, mildly put, ensure they are persuaded to stay in other equivalent hotels at our expense, because we could not accommodate them! For a self-paying guest, such a situation was profitable, because, the hotel expense for the night was saved, but, the smart and experienced traveller would always turn around and say: “I am going to suffer by this change; so what I do get or how do I get compensated for this trouble?”  It would then be left to the discretion of the handling associate/supervisor, who would offer bonus points, a free stay coupon or a dinner voucher.
 
Our night auditors, who operated the “grave-yard shift” from 11.00pm till 7.00am the next morning, always faced this music. Most of the time; in order to over this trouble, both the day and the afternoon shift supervisors took the responsibility of making standby bookings in nearby hotels, if rooms were available, so that, instead of passing this unpleasant task to the night auditors and give trouble to guests who arrived late at night, we managed to persuade a few willing guests during the evening itself.
 
I distinctly recall one occasion, where we already had couple of snow falls, some 5 to 7 inches with couple of days’ interval; snow was still on the ground and one more snowstorm was predicted for the night. Our coach service to the airport ceases at 10.30 at night, and starts at seven in the morning. Only when we have a group of seven to 10 guests request a 6 O’clock airport drop, we arranged for the driver to be present. In this particular case, after we had confirmed requests for cabs by various guests, to arrive between six and 6.15, we had made bookings with our regular cab companies.
 
When Maria, the night auditor turned up by 10.30; she was always very punctual, she received the message that her colleague, the second auditor, called off because his area, in Maryland, was already snowing. So, I volunteered to take care of the front office, while she prepared for the evening. And I decided to stay back in the hotel that night because I was on a back-to-back shift and had to work starting at 7.00am! By about 1.00am I went to my suite to sleep and had dozed off immediately because I had reported for duty at mid day that day. Already, it was a long day and I was very tired.
 
I think I had hardly slept, when I received the phone call from Maria, saying, “Ram, I need you to come down and take a guest to the airport immediately, as the cab drivers have called off and the cab company do not have drivers”. It was a frantic call, I came down as fast as I could but our coaches would take at least 10 minutes before they get warmed up in the freezing weather!.  Mind you, I had to be in my uniform but I simply went down to the garage, picked up my car, and brought it up; apologized to the guest and his family and drove them to the airport. In the meantime, there were frantic calls from the airline asking for this guest! Because of the heavy snow I had to drive very carefully and I dropped them off at gate No: 9.There was already a uniformed person standing there who looked like the aircraft captain; my passengers thanked me, gave me a big tip and were immediately rushed to the waiting aircraft. Later on, we came to know that he was one of the captains whose services (or presence, I suppose) were urgently required at the destination. It had stopped snowing by then, but there was a lot of snow on the ground!
 
For performing this duty, I was named the employee of the month!

(AK Ramdas has worked with the Engineering Export Promotion Council of the ministry of commerce and was associated with various committees of the Council. His international career took him to places like Beirut, Kuwait and Dubai at a time when these were small trading outposts. From being the advisor to exporters, he took over the mantle of a trader, travelled far and wide, and switched over to setting up garment factories and then worked in the US. He can be contacted at [email protected].)