Imagine working for a hotel that is very understaffed. If you were supposed to be working at the reception desk but also had to handle other duties that took you away from the desk, how would you prioritize?

In this story, one employee who is in this situation comes up with a loophole and a clever way of explaining the situation to the hotel guests.

Keep reading for all the details.

“We don’t care how understaffed you are, every customer must get priority service”

Used to work in a hotel with about a thousand rooms. All employees were being “crosstrained” when I came on board which essentially meant rather than hiring enough people, every “idle” 5 minutes was to be spent helping out one of the other drowning departments.

Most of my time was either dedicated to service or reception, but we got plenty of housekeeping & tech department odd jobs thrown our way too.

This was pretty normal since tech were by far the smallest department, around 3 people for 1000 cheaply constructed rooms, and housekeeping were also tiny for the impossible amount of work they had to do.

They had a lot of duties.

So what duties could be expected in reception?

• replace door batteries, light bulbs, unclog drains
• restock tea & coffee, coffee makers, kettles, hairdryers, TP, anything guests were missing/ran out of after they checked in
• room service for any COVID isolation cases
• ticket stubbing for events
• manning the bar
• garage duties (there was a whole rental thing going on and properly returned rentals were a rarity)
• anything else that was flung at us with the label “urgent” (like room tours & occasionally even making our own staff lunches)

Eventually, OP found a loophole.

Ignoring our repeated requests to cut down the number of available rooms until we had enough staff to actually PROVIDE the service we advertised, management also informed us we were there to placate the after sales cases (disgruntled customers rightly ticked off that they don’t get what they’re promised).

So after months of going by the book, I finally found myself a comfortable little loophole.

Any tech or housekeeping issue was obviously higher priority than reception since for example not having toilet paper or working lights/drains/doors was an unacceptable condition for guests, so waiting 2 hours to be checked in or book breakfast were preferable by far.

Having 2-3 receptionists on shift to man 3 phones, emails, scanners & printers for guest registrations (yeah we still had 1 foot in the 90’s), and trouble shoot reservations, one of us would be on the desk checking people in, if another was available they’d be on digital responses (just taking one call after another while working through emails), and I would take every single tech and housekeeping job that came.

Here’s how he handled complaints…

If any of us received complaints we’d explain the situation: “I’m sorry but there’s currently an emergency [insert technical/hsk issue here] that will have to take priority. If you’d be so kind as to wait in line until my colleague comes back he’ll see to you upon his return.”

I’m pretty resilient when idgaf anymore so I told them to put any difficult guests in my line too unless their problem was high priority.

Whenever I got back I’d have 30 mins to 2 hours to work through the line before the next thing would come up and I’d apologetically leave.

He gave guests a clever idea.

When they demanded an explanation or just started yelling I’d simply explain our duties, and say I fully agree that this is not a comfortable condition for guests to be in, and they in turn would agree that providing toilet paper and other essentials needed to come first.

Naturally wanting to provide all customers with the tools to improve their future experience, I always rounded off these kinds of conversations with a warm thank you and an “If you can think of any suggestions that might improve your and other guests’ future experiences here, please let us know on trip advisor – feedback, of ANY nature, is always valuable to us”

Reviews came flooding in that were either talking about a massive dip in quality or how understaffed/poorly managed the place was, but funnily enough I never heard one bad word against the staff.

Management didn’t make a big change to the hiring policy so I eventually left, but last I heard almost everyone had quit not long after I did and the place has since rebranded, presumably to get away from the rating that dropped a couple stars.

Now I’m trying to think which hotel chain recently changed their name! Using Trip Advisor reviews against the company was a clever plan.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This is awful! I would’ve found another hotel.

This is a really sad situation for hotel guests.

Leaving reviews online really is a great idea.

Some things do have to be a bigger priority than others.

Multiple bad reviews really can make a big difference.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.