Agents Of Change

Image courtesy of Sukritim.org

In my very recent past I was employed at a hotel, Country Inns & Suites by Carlson, and we had been open a little over a year. The first year started rather slowly and during this slow period, we'd managed to acquire a hand full of loyal customers. One particular group of customers pretty much had the run of the house: They'd basically helped us open the doors to our hotel; there'd been times in the beginning where these guys would be our only guest in-house out of a total of 66 rooms.

Business started picking up and reached a point where our rooms were staying full to capacity a min of 5 nights a week, which meant that we were practically turning people away at the door. Now, what happened was that one group of regulars we had in-house started getting shuffled around in the mix of new customers that we were acquiring and our whole accounting system was being affected. Prices started changing in a dynamic fashion where some people were charged say, $60 in the beginning with a twenty to thirty dollar increase during a course of bi-weekly increments. 

When business was slow we had the payment method set with our regulars to where, everyday during the course a 24-hour period, someone from the group would stop by and pay their room rent for the day. There was no set time that the room had to be paid for just as long as it was paid in a reasonable amount of time. At times, 2 and a half days would go by before someone stopped and paid the bill. Which in the beginning when business was slow....that system worked out just fine.

Needless to say, it reached a point to where someone would say so and so came down from the room and paid for the day, or back paid for 2 days that had to be paid; however, since they were paying with cash....there wasn't a record being showed on the computer, no receipt had been printed at times, or other times it was just little technical errors made by one of the new clerks, or even a veteran clerk who'd gotten busy and forgot to post the payment. However it transpired....things of that nature were happening because normally these guys would stay overnight and had to be at work before check out time, thus they either would send someone in at lunch to pay for the room, they'd call and let us know by lunch whether or not they would stay another night and if so they'd pay when they came in after work. All of this was happening right along with shift changes, new faces, messages past from this to that person, ( some of which never were delivered to the next 2 shifts ). So the solution that we came up with worked like this: Every morning when the housekeepers checked that guest's room, if their property was still in the room while they went to work it was assumed that they'd be staying another night ( or at least coming back for their property ), thus, we were to lock their room and deactivate the key. Therefore, by all circumstances they'd have to come to the front for a key. Whatever shift that occurrence happened to transpire on, it was the staff on duty's job to settle the account then and there before a key to the room was issued.  If for some odds reason the steps didn't not go in that particular order and the guest's account got screwed in the systems, the discrepancies were deducted from whoever messed up these steps.

On face value it would seem that this would be the common way that things with any guest, regular in-house or not, were to unfold by default. However, if you've ever worked in a hotel long enough to see guest actually make this there home away from home side by side with walk-in guest constantly revolving 24 hours a day 7 days a week, I'm quite certain that you're aware that there's just too many unknown variables that arise at whelm for this system to ever be that predictable and simple. Long story short, it took well over 3 weeks for the new way of handling things finally worked smoothly.