Working as Hotel Staff

=P Senior French diplomats making sexual demands on the cleaning staff

I've worked as a cleaner in a posh hotel and in the laundry. And the things you find beggar belief.

In the laundry, it's dirty underwear. People will send the nastiest dirtiest bits of undercrackers to be washed. Whether they think it's all done automatically, I don't know. But yeah, wear gloves.

Not a hotel staff worker, but I've stayed at a few hotels that allow for pet boarding. If you've got a VIP staff then they're likely to run into the "darling" little creatures that a VIP simply can't be parted from. Taking care of and cleaning up after them could be an issue your character deals with. Also, dealing with other people who don't like how loud said pet can get when left alone in a room.

My mom used to be a hotel maid and I sometimes went with her to work to help her clean rooms. I could tell you LOTS of stories of how messy people are when they checkout. You wouldn't believe some of the things we found when cleaning rooms. There were even times when hotel guests would steal stuff from the rooms (like towels, bedding, etc.) and there were even times when a hotel guest would sneak out to avoid paying for the room.

My husband was a bellman at a luxury hotel for many years (as he was also an aspiring actor!). Lots of famous people stayed there. He has a funny story about a famous aging rocker who was really stoned and locked himself out of the hotel room. The scene went something like this:

ROCKER: I lost my key.
BELLMAN: It's okay Mr. X, we can get you another one.
ROCKER: But I need to find my driver's license.
BELLMAN: It's okay, you don't need it. We know who you are.
ROCKER: No man, you don't understand. I lost it and I need to find it. I'm too fuckin' wasted to do it. Can you come up to the room and find it for me?

My husband took him up to the room, which was completely trashed. The rocker crashed on his bed while my husband went through his stuff, and finally found the guy's driver's license in the pocket of a pair of pants.

A guest once had a complete hissy fit because the hotel hadn't been decorated for Christmas yet. She was in town at Thanksgiving to do some shopping she screamed in the lobby "I'm am VERY DISAPPOINTED that there were NO twinkly white lights to greet me!!!" The management got to work right away, making employees run into storage and start putting lights up for her.

There are more--but I'm saving them for my own book.

I spent a few weeks in Housekeeping (which is what the chambermaids were known as in that hotel). Problems included...

* Cleaning up a flooded bathroom
* Sorting out some sort of home-made pot pourri that had glued itself to a hotel plate
* Stained sheets (and, er, 'moist' beds)
* 'Clean' sheets and towels that came back from the laundry stained
* 'Do not disturb' signs. At 2pm.
* Running out of standard supplies
* Demands for all sorts of strange, weird and wonderful things.
* All sorts of electrical things left plugged in that we really didn't want to see or know about

Never worked in a hotel, but this article was in Reader's Digest awhile ago. Might give you some ideas.

http://www.rd.com/slideshows/13-things-your-hotel-desk-clerk-wont-tell-you/

Rachel Udin said:

The Hotel I set up has a VIP staff, front desk, maid staff, security, management, upper management and chef and Laundry sections.

The characters I'm working with work in the VIP and the maid section.

I need stories about guests and troubles with guests. Also a bit about what a lay person staying in a hotel might not know.

I found the Guest Room cleaning checklist... but I'm more interested in making problems for my staff. Typical and out there problems.

I'd prefer, somewhat if it was from people who actually worked in a hotel. And if you didn't work at a hotel. =P Please mark your post as such, so I can properly weigh it.

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Oh the stories I could tell you - and you'd never belive some of them.

Guest who shit the bed, or opened the door naked to room service, sexual advances, violence was pretty common - especially in the bar area and ESPECIALLY during wedding receptions. But then, this is Ireland and It's not a decent wedding unless there's a punch up.

I've seen all sorts of things thrown out of windows - inlcuding matresses.

Oh, and hookers were very popular with certain guests.

And let me not even get started on what happened behind the scenes among the staff.

Ever noticed how there are two bowls of lemon and lime slices on the bar. how nice or how unpleasant you are to the staff will determine which bowl your lemon comes out of - and TRUST me, we called them dirty lemons for a reason. Always tip folks, and ALWAYS be nice to people who handle your food.

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

I worked as a maid in a resort one summer back in 1971. We punched a time clock.

I remember one time a child's stuffed animal ended up in the laundry and I had to retrieve it. Another child was a bedwetter; I got tipped heavily for dealing with the mess.

Patrons had issues with which way the toilet paper was placed on the dowel...I kid you not.

I walked into one room during a convention and asked the lady which bed she had used as neither looked the worse for wear. "Neither," she replied. "Haven't you ever heard of affairs?" Then she showed me the photo of the guy she spent the night with.

Once one of the maids couldn't get into the room. Eventually, they got someone to break into the room. The customer had bolted the door, then killed himself. Not sure of the method.

If we had a lot of late check-outs and a lot of early check-ins, we could get extremely rushed and would end up not vacuuming.

This was a beach resort and the usual plastic bags for wet swimsuits weren't available most of the summer. The customers took it out verbally on us, rather than the management.

Not a job I ever want to do again.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

Have worked in a hotels for several years and also work in a resort hotel right now.

Let me know if you have any questions as I work at the front desk and can likely answer anything.

In the late 70's I worked in the banquetting bar of the old Albany hotel in Glasgow (I think its now a holiday Inn). This dealt with functions and private bars set up in suites.

Drink promotions (that particular brand is free but guests pay for anything else) - you fill all the empty bottles of that particular brand with whatever similar spirit is cheapest/most plentiful.

A 'double' is two semi-taps of the optic.

If its a wedding then pray you're not on table service.

Private functions.
Hear no evil, see no evil.
Don't go into the en suite bathroom. Ever.
Politely decline when propositioned by drunk middle-aged businesswomen. And men. Or both together.
Try not to flinch when someone pukes in the ice bucket.
Politely inform the guests that you don't have a drugs connection.
Its a free bar so you don't get tips. At the end of the evening if a guest stuffs a tenner in your shirt pocket and squeezes your balls, try to smile.
Ignore the fact that the female member of staff you're working with is offering guests 'extras' later that night.
Ignore the fact that the male member of staff you're working with is offering guests 'extras' later that night.
Express no opinion when asked what wine bottle would best serve as an ad hoc dildo.

reiver33 said:

If its a wedding then pray you're not on table service.

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In our function suite table service consisted of 'pouring' and 'silver service' - I wasn't allow to do either because my hands shake and I once spilled red wine on a bride.

Silver service is when you each waitress has a platter in one hand and a serving fork and spoon (larger than regular cutlery, but not huge) which you held in the other hand, and you used both of them to lift things off the platter onto the plate of each guest to their specifications. the only thing we didn't serve that way was mashed potato and chips which were served in large communual bowls, usually four or five to a table.

Pouring consists of going table to table and topping up glasses. For dinner it's a bottle of red in one hand and a bottle of white in the other - and you will be expected to be able to pour with either hand. This will be going on at the same time as silver service and gravy - waiting staff pour the gravy for each guest as well, nothing as common as leaving a boat on a table. You willl have three or four gravy boats on a tray in one hand and pout with the other.

The top table ALWAYS gets served first. Two waiting staff at a time - one starts with the bride, the other starts with the groom and they work outwards from there along the rest of the wedding party.

Likewise, if it's a business or charity function you always serve the most important table first - so the organisers or special guests or dignitaries etc.

And all the while you are dancing around the other staff to avoid collisions and not being seen by guests.

We also had table service, which is waitressing for drinks. That usually tipped REALLY well.

And when someone said 'and take one for yourself' we added the cost of a drink to the order - usually around £3.50/4.00

Other times when paying cash they would slide a pound or two pound coin across the counter and that was your tip.

In 2006/7 I was making a hundred a night in tips (on top of my wages). We didn't pool our tips either, you tips were your own. And you always made more if we had a working class function. Rich people are cheap tippers, brickies and shelf stackers on the hand are always more generous.

Also, we were a pretty posh hotel, and in all the time I worked there we only had two functions that had a free bar. Everything else was a cash bar, including all weddings. But that might a cultural thing because everyone here has cash bars.

And we ran two function rooms for each function. After the meal all teh guest would retire to a smaller room for an hour to allow the staff to strip the room of dinner service and rearrange the tables to make sure that there were none on the dance floor, change all the tablecloths and candles and adjust the lighting, and also to allow the band or DJ to set up.

In all it was a pretty slick operation.

We did a lot of school formals too, and the unspoken agreement was that no one would be asked for ID.

School formals were always the tough functions. But we usually went home at the end of night with a lot of free alcohol. Licencing laws mean that you can't bring alcohol onto the premises, but that never stopped the kids trying to sneak vodka into the place. They used to hide it outside or in their handbags. We always ended up with about 30 or 40 bottles of wine and spirits which had been confiscated. No one ever came back to collect them so they were divied up among the staff. They were good nights.

Oh, and if you had a 'tab' then you handed over your credit card or room key and we put it in a pint glass behind the bar. When you ordered drinks you signed the reciept and it was added to your glass. At the end of the night they were all added up, and you paid with your credit card. Or it was taken through to be added to your room bill.

Rachel Udin said:

I basically need problems faced by VIP and housekeeping staff that would create enough issues long term. I'm fishing because I need it to be complex and unique enough that people wouldn't think about it normally.

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Theft or, more accurately, accusations of theft were always a big issue. I'd seen so many housekeepers being accused by some posh woman of stealing various items of jewellery and clothing. Cue a lot of hysterical shouting from the woman and hysterical crying from the maid who was about to get fired for something she hadn't done. Almost every time it turned out the item was still in the room, or actually on the woman herself. Not once did those women ever apologise, but many of the husbands left an envelope with quite a lot of money for the accused to say sorry.

Sexual harrassment was common among certain types of clients - usually middle class business men who thought the staff were their to service him. Sadly those cases were made to go away before they ever came to something.



Also because I need a bit of dissonance between the character who is kinda cushioned and spoiled with a bit of a delusion doing this kind of work (voluntarily) and showing how those two things interact. She actually likes it.

Does maid staff work in pairs even after training for posh hotels?[/QUOTE]

Our place had a team who worked the rooms. One would strip and change the beds and towels all of which went into a big bin to be collected by the laundry. all the table clothes and napkins went too. it wasn't done in house, we sent it out to a company. most hotels and restaurants do.

Another person would do the bathroom/general tidying and someone else would be working along the floor with a hoover.

Other things to note:

all the bottles were glass and the empties were collected every couple of days by the bottling company.

you generally only work with one brewery and you are tied into what they sell. certain breweries have certain selections.

changing a beer keg is not difficult if you remember to turn the air off. other wise it's like letting off the biggest bottle of shaken cola ever.


Oh, and hotel staff HATE wedding planners.

I worked summers as a motel maid when I was in high school. A lot of guys would answer the door naked. Some wouldn't answer at all, but when I'd use the passkey to open the door, there they'd be - naked. I guess they liked trying to shock the maids or something.

Once (after the requisite knock) my fellow maid and I proceeded to clean an adjoining room. Talking and laughing, we moved on to the attached bedroom, only to find a person asleep or at least pretending to be asleep in the bed. I don't know who was more mortified; he or us.

I'll have to wrack my brain to see if I can remember more.

Make up the wildest, goriest, raunchiest, funniest or most horrific story you can think of and I guarantee it's happened. Likely many times.

I do not, and have never, worked in a hotel. But I have friends who are inn keepers (B&B style) who love to regale me about the guests. Do not ever believe that anything you do will be kept in confidence. Sometimes there will even be pictures. And video. My favorite was the bridal party that left an alligator in the bathtub.

What happens in Key West is posted on YouTube...

Jeff

I've got loads of stories about silver service if you want one, OP.

Rachel Udin said:

Does maid staff work in pairs even after training for posh hotels?

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Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: While hoovering, arranging towels and so on can be done solo, when it comes to changing the sheets you need two people for a quick change with good results. One person just can't hold both ends of the sheet at the same time, and trying to make it look semi-professional takes more than twice as long if you're on your own.

We worked as a team of ten or twelve, with pairs leapfrogging rooms down the corridor, one woman in charge and one woman to deal with the minibars. Much safer that way, and there was always extra help on hand if it was a bigger-than-two job.

If you're looking for general stories from hotel staff, there's a memoir called Heads in Beds that came out recently. I've only read the sample, but seemed interesting enough.

From being a guest

This is the weirdest thing I saw as a guest.

I was driving across country and had stopped over in some hotel in the mid-West. I woke up at 6 a.m. or so and headed out of my room for breakfast, and there's a little boy laying in the hallway sound asleep. There was no one else around, so I had no idea how he got there.

I went downstairs and reported it to the front desk clerk. At first, they didn't believe me. They thought I was making it up. But one of the staff went up to check anyway. It turned out that the boy had been staying in his room with his parents. He'd woken up to use the bathroom, went out the wrong door, and couldn't get back in. So he laid on the carpet and went to sleep.

That's the practicality of a small child.

Well, a murder actually happened at one of the hotels I worked at. Not long term, and maybe not even original for a story, but it happened.

As far as long term with housekeeping, maids are often accused of stealing (many times only for the item to show up in the guests possession or elsewhere on property). We also had issues of housekeepers watching spanish soap operas in guest rooms they were supposed to be cleaning, and someone got fired for sleeping in one of the rooms as well while they were supposed to be working.

As far as VIP staff, I've never really had any in my experience. I can see that some very high end hotels may, but the ones I've worked in did not (3-4 star).

There could be issues though with the personality of the employee vs the guest. Some guests come in already angry, and may easily get annoyed with an employee who they think is being mean or insincere with them.

Don't forget about surveys and reviews! Hotels actually take these very seriously, so it could be a problem if someone consistently scores badly.

Anyway, you were being pretty vague, but I hope I was able to help some. If you have anything else just let me know.

While many accusations of theft may be false, we did have one happen to us. My whole family, actually, during my wedding :-\ Turns out the maid had let her boyfriend tag along while she cleaned rooms, and he emptied out all the wallets he found. She happened to clean while my family was at the pool (and therefore left their wallets/purses in the room), and nobody noticed until they went out to dinner that night. Luckily this was a few hours AFTER my wedding, because if it had been before, he would have gotten several hundred dollars' worth of tips intended for various wedding professionals!

The hotel tried to handle it internally, but since there were credit cards taken and more than $500 in cash missing, my father filed a police report and the like. I believe the maid was fired and her boyfriend went (back) to jail, but I was on my honeymoon at the time so I heard about all of this second-hand

I can tell you that hotel managers are very careful about which staff they call in to deal with which functions.

The sad thing about service is that it relies heavily on young and unskilled staff - so you get a lot of kids working, and some of them don't have the maturity to handle certain groups or situations. We did a lot of gay weddings when no one else was doing them, and the managers always had the same four of us working them because no one else could be counted on to be respectful and not joke or make inappropriate comments etc. Same thing when we did Indian weddings - which are HUGE affairs that would take over the whole hotel and quite somber and formal - very different to the rowdy Irish weddings we usually catered for.

That said, I've also seen managers snap. I remember one function where this real asshat got really shitty because he'd come to the bar and hadn't been served immediately (there were others there before him) and he was awfully important don't you know. So he complained and in response we apologised and I offered to take his order and bring it down to his table - even though that wasn't my job.

Literally two minutes later, as I'm traying up his rather large order, he arrives at the bar again, again giving out and wants to see the manager. he starts going on about how bad the service is and how his daughter is getting married in our hotel in october and he's going to cancel it because of the incompetant staff etc. My manager, instead of pandering, went 'Okay then, if you come with me we'll fill in the documents.'

And he did. Tearful couple phoned the next morning and after a short explanation of why their wedding was cancelled it was rebooked etc. my manger didn't have any intention of actually cancelling the wedding, but it was a good lesson learned and when the actual wedding rolled around (a note was made in the book so we knew what might happen) the father of the bride was on his very best behaviour.

Entitled guests are a real pain in the ass.

Katrina S. Forest said:

If you're looking for general stories from hotel staff, there's a memoir called Heads in Beds that came out recently. I've only read the sample, but seemed interesting enough.

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A friend of mine has read it and said it was VERY interesting.

I work at a national (US) chain of business hotels as a front desk agent.

Most of our business is done during the week, and we frequently sell out on Mon-Wed nights. Our General Manager is usually there M-F office hours, with the Exec. Housekeeper doing basically the same, but sometimes working odd hours (she's there on some 11am-7pm shifts this week for some reason). Housekeepers generally show up at 8am, leaving for the day anywhere after abut 1pm, depending on how much they have to do. The slot is vacant at the moment, but a maintenance person would usually be there from about 7am-4pm M-F. We serve a complimentary hot breakfast buffet, so there's a breakfast host to do that from about 7am-11am every day. Front desk shifts run 7am-3pm, 3pm-11pm, and 11pm-7am.

I work the 3-11 shift four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. My Mon and Weds shifts are usually busy, and I have a second desk person scheduled with me from 4-10ish. My GM is usually gone by 5, after which it's just us at the front desk and a shuttle driver, who when he isn't running that is back in housekeeping folding towels and folding/ironing pillowcases.

My Sat and Sun shifts are different, as once the 7am-3pm person hands the desk over to me and housekeeping leaves, I'm there COMPLETELY alone for the night. A good portion of the time, housekeeping brings me bins of towels and/or pillowcases to fold/iron (if you see me come out from the back area of the front office, there's a very good chance I wasn't back there texting, so cut me a break, ok?) Sometimes I will also bring my laptop and try to get a bit of writing done during the quieter times. This past Saturday night, SaraP and Shuemais from AW chat were driving through my area on a road trip, and I was able to sit and chat with them in the lobby/breakfast area for a good long while. Just forwarded the calls to the cordless phone and got up when necessary.

Some of the biggest issues we deal with happen on our sold out nights, and usually have to do with people who booked a "standard" (i.e. take your chances with where we stick you) room on a third party website. These rooms DO NOT specify smoking or non, and then people get upset when we have them assigned to one of our few smoking rooms. If we're sold out and everyone else paid specifically for a non-smoking room, then tough titties, nothing we can do. Same with bed preferences (booking standard and sending it with a request for a King is no guarantee). We also sometimes have issues like a window leaking or a few ants, or a TV not working correctly. If we're not sold out, we will just move the guest to a different room, but if we're sold out, a band-aid solution (and extra loyalty program points/possibly a discount) are really all we are able to do. We can't even "walk" you to a different hotel, because if we sell out, all of the other hotels in our area do as well.

Other issues include people who book online at discounted rates without reading the fine print that tells them the savings is because they are agreeing to a pre-paid, non-refundable, non-alterable reservation, and then call and get upset because we won't cancel/change it. The other common one is people who don't read the hotel info as carefully as they should (where it DOES give the shuttle hours), and then are surprised when they check in telling me they need our airport shuttle when they check out on Saturday (or 4am on Thursday or something) and I have to inform them that it only runs M-F 7am-10pm. In that case we can set them up with a car service, but they do have to pay for that.

As someone earlier in the thread mentioned, survey scores are a big deal with us. If our avg. yearly score isn't above a certain threshold, the hotel owners (franchise) will be required to pay a fine in the thousands. Not all guests receive the email survey. It's random and supposedly anonymous, but the guest has to provide their room number and dates of stay, so it's easy enough for us to look up who exactly the survey came from (and we do). Our computer also forces each employee to log in/out of the system, so our software can tell us exactly who accessed each reservation (or at least who was logged in at the time), and what they did with it, so we can figure out who is at fault for mistakes.

As for funny stories, I have a few, but this site should provide you with all you could ever need. I could get lost for hours reading them xD

I remember one set of guests we had, a mother and her adult son, maybe in his mid 20s. He spoke to her like an insolent 12yo the entire time. I wanted to slap the attitude right out of his mouth and demand that his mother discipline him if he was going to behave like a child. The completely abused the privilege of the shuttle one evening, keeping our driver out taking them to shops and even a spa all night. The next day if they asked to go anywhere I was going to offer to call them a car service, but thankfully it didn't come up again. They ordered food from a local delivery service, and when they paid the driver with a credit card (he had a smartphone with a Square reader), there was some question about it possibly being a stolen card. He took a photo of her license or something and they argued in and out of the lobby over it for over an hour. We almost had to call the police. The son once stood at the desk staring until I asked if I could help him with something. The only answer he gave was to burp, stare blankly for another few seconds, and walk away. I wasn't there when it happened, but they eventually DID end up having to call the police because the woman insisted our housekeepers had stolen her wallet. After tearing the room apart and grilling our entire housekeeping staff, the wallet was found in the son's room (along with a Narcotics Anon book of some sort, so...) We were told NOT to extend their stay and to insist that we were sold out if they ever made a reservation trying to come back.

Last night I had a group of guys who are staying for a couple of weeks who for some reason thought it perfectly appropriate to tailgate in the porte corchere, blocking all traffic trying to drive through or park to check in. Loud music, smoking, grilling, you name it. I was dumbfounded at having to go out there and tell them "I'm sorry, you can't do this here. You're blocking any other cars from using the driveway. You need to move all of this stuff right now!" I really wanted to say "Are you serious? What the hell are you thinking? Who raised you people?!"

Once, on a Saturday night while I was there alone, I had a guest call and tell me that the door handle to his room had fallen off in his hand. When I went down there, I had to use my master key, as he was literally trapped inside. We moved him to a different room a few doors down, and I gave him 15 minutes or so before calling and checking that he was finished with the first room so I could lock it up. He said yes, and I walked down to do so. To void all other keys that might be out, I had to program a new key and use it in the door, and I poked my head in to make sure he hadn't left anything. He'd left the TV on, so I walked in to shut that off, and...the door slammed shut behind me. There were no other employees there to call, since it was a weekend evening, and I had to call the guest and slide my new key under the door for him to let me out. I figured he would understand, lol!

Anyway, I know it's not the same sort of hotel you're writing about, but I hope this helps a little