Unreasonable Owners

[Lostfiniel]

I currently work as a supervisor in a hotel. It's a pretty nice one, we get few problems and, right now, our front desk staff is pretty reliable. Our immediate management is the best I have ever worked for. My assistant general manager and general manager are some of the nicest most professional people around.

That being said, please allow me to rant a bit about a recent incident.

Yesterday before I left my morning shift, I had been overviewing the incoming reservations for the day. I noticed we had three rooms held for friends of the owner. The rate was right, I blocked them in rooms with good locations and we had housekeeping make sure everything was in order.

When I came in this morning, our night auditor was in a bad mood. Something had happened with the rooms. I couldn't get a clear story out of him. There were now four rooms we were working with and two of them were still under "reservations" instead of "in-house" He said one of those two should have checked in last night, he didn't know why they were not. Then, the person who had been a fourth had not had a reservation and as such, our front desk agent was unsure about giving her the very low rate that went along with knowing the owners. They were upset about that.

I planned to contact that employee around 9:00AM to ask her directly what had happened. Before I got a chance, the owner of the hotel called me and gave me a talking to. He said he was unhappy that we had turned away any guests, especially his friends. (I had assumed that was the other reservations.) He couldn't understand why, when we had so many rooms available, we had let anybody walk out of the hotel. He asked me to contact my assistant general manager and tell her to call him.

Well, we finally got a hold of the front desk agent and got the full story, after a couple more calls between her and the owner, it was figured out. One of the reservations had been put under the wrong name. Now, whether that was from the owner, from corporate, or from the guests, we do not know. So, when they had come to checkin, our employee could not find them. She did not turn them away. She told them she would get them in a room and call me sometime this morning to get the right rate (such a low rate can only be done by management.)

Not only that, the people were very rude to her. They were upset when she couldn't read their name on the worn out credit card they had. They gave attitude the whole time and they were digusted that not everything was done for them already.

The owner never apologized. He did commend me on fixing the rate for them.

[Evil Queen]

Gee, this sounds oh-so familiar. -_-' My current boss (also owner) has a terrible habit of doing just that.

One of the people we kicked out (read; I kicked out) was a friend of the owner. He didn't seem to phased by it; as if he expected it to happen. I wish we could get a knew owner, this guy is starting to take the hotel down a very sleezy path.

[smileyeagle1021]

that's one reason I'll be happy to get out of the call center... there is nothing I hate more than getting an owner who gets angry at US for being transferred to us when I know damn well they train their own employees to just transfer all calls also.

[sms001]

They're such a common occurance they should have their own acronym in the CS lexicon - Fotos Friends of the owners. Sadly, the good ones are few and far between. I used to work door at a nightclub whose owner was indeed a VERY nice, friendly guy. Was he running around town saying "Come into my club sometime" to everyone he met? Probably. Was he saying "Come into my club sometime for free?"
Not so much. My standard line ran like this:

"Oh, you can let us in - we're friends of Gary's."

"Well, if you know Gary you know he can use every buck he can get....."

Sounds like you and the staff handled things about as well as can be expected under the circumstances.

[Lostfiniel]

This is on par with this particular owner. His dad was the one who started a large hotel chain that covered the country. When he retired, he sold those hotels off and had this one particular hotel built for his children to run.

The dad is always friendly and understanding. All of his kids came into money by birth and I think it has ruined some of them.

The dad came in a week or so ago to make some changes to some reservations he had for friends. For the life of me, I could not find their reservations, although I offered to make new ones. He didn't get upset. He called up the corporate office and asked, very nicely, "Hey _______, do we know the plans for the ______ family? Oh? Ok, thank you!" His wife had decided they would be staying at the house instead of the hotel. He apologized to me and thanked me for my trouble.

[thehippie777]

Our owners are just old. The only issue we have with them is them telling us we are spending too much money as the hotel ages badly. Usually they will get their rooms for people they know organized just fine. Our District Manager is anther story. He used to be the hotel manager here. Well, he has this nasty habit of telling people, "yeah yeah we can get a room for ya", but not set one up. Of course we would get people as confused as us that D hadn't gotten them set even though he said he did. He was a great manager, but sucky when it came to remembering crap he told people

[Gerrinson]

Oh, the stories of the owner of my hotel... I'll just give you a recent example.

We've not been doing great financially but part of that is being in the off season, and another part of that is investing massive amounts of money in renovations. Renovating is good, right?

The owner was telling us to cut back on costs and she wanted to reduce our payroll by 20% in my department by cutting out overtime. Note that I had the most OT of anyone, at 1.5 hours of OT over the space of 2 weeks. That does not even come close to 20% of my paycheck, but I digress...

Anyway, cut costs everywhere. Fine, no problem. Then, when choosing items for renovating one of our guest houses, she bought 12" by 15" bathroom sinks at $15,000 each. That's right - $15,000 per sink. Granted there are only 4 sinks, but are you thinking? $60,000 in sinks alone? Sure, they're carved from solid pieces of beautiful imported marble, but we could have gotten something that is the same in appearance, while being far less in cost and maintenance. The 'special' cleanser we need for this marble costs over $100 per bottle and is only sold by the sink manufacturer (shocking!) I bet we could find a cheaper cleanser that works just fine, but what do I know? We'll have to sell out the entire building every night for a year to make up the renovation costs alone, let alone approach turn a profit on that building. And many nights the whole building sits empty. Not to mention that if the marble gets cracked then the entire sink is ruined...

With 2/3 of the main building, and several other guest houses, left to renovate, I can only imagine what ridiculous expenses will be racked up while she pressures the rest of us to 'cut costs.'

[powerboy]

I work in the Self Storage Trade. Our Owner

• Raised the prices on everyones unit, even the tenets that was there instead of raising the prices for the new people.
• Is willing to cut a deal with everyone, all the while staying in the red.
• Is willing to spend $30,000 on advertising for only 3 zip-codes, when most of our customers are from the other 16 zip-codes.

[Becks]

Gerrinson, your owner is an idiot.

You can tell her I said so.

[RayvenQ]

In malia, in a few places, the owners know me, mainly through my aunt who lives and works there, and boy, it's quite a pain to get them to allow you to pay, It's quite funny when things get into an almost heated argument about how much I'm paying, usually we settle on a compromise, I pay 3/4. But they know I wouldn't take advantage of them or their employees or be anything but perfectly polite, as my aunt would most certainly chew me a new one if i did.