Today I will celebrate THAT SUCKS DAY by sharing one of my best learning stories of my training in hotel. For confidentiality I will not disclose the brands name but it is one of the most prominent 5 star hotels India.
Belonging to a typical middle class, it has always been a dream to work at 5 stars hotel, during my Front Office days, the department responsible from baggage claim to check-in, concierge. It’s the first impression to guests when you enter to the reception. As an intern we used to just greet the guest and collect their baggage, helped it get it upto their rooms, in simple terms I was a bell boy.
We were a 5 interns batch working around the clock and I as a person take my job very seriously, I listened and coordinated with every job the staff gave me I did it with everything that I had. One particular weekend, we had were overbooked ( literally ) and had around 500 check-ins and outs in one single afternoon, I followed every instruction that the luggage handlers had for me and then just around 7:00pm I hear shouting from a guest to the duty managers as his bag is missing. It seems he lost his bag for 3 hours now and has a flight to catch, also he was from the armed forces, so a high priority guest lists his bag at a 5 star Hotel. What more could go wrong.
After 2 hours of searching I remembered putting a bag, same as the guests description and put in another room, it turns out the staff had gave a bag and made me put it in an empty room “accidentally”. After recovering the bag, the guest was already late for his flight which the hotel had to reimburse for by paying 25k, my seniors well some were fine saying “It happens” and the other blamed it on me.
That particular day I thought why am I here taking shit for their incompetence and carelessness, then eventually I realised it’s “Life”, experiences are required. This experience really had me saying out loud “That Sucks”