Midweek Mayhem

The day never slows down for a Hotelie.

We rose early this morning, breakfasted, and came to class treated to Hotel Horrors, clips revealing the deeply disturbing and unhygienic conditions throughout the service continuum. Basically, whether you’re at a budget motel or luxury suite, realize that there were people before you, and inevitably against a backlight, there will be normally invisible gunk as well as harmful bacteria revealed all over the bed, sheets, pillows, remote, phone, and even the walls.

To add to our disgust, we found out that it was common practice for housekeepers to “clean” dirty hotel room glasses with a single rinse in the bathroom sink, then dried by a dirty towel, which spreads bacteria even more.

Then, the tables were turned as we viewed these desecrations from the hotel’s point of view. When word gets out about these things, companies have to have a systematic way of communicating with employees, fixing the problem, and regaining reputation and customer trust. Thus began our lesson on crisis management.

Students took turns role-playing from the perspectives of various levels of managers, assistants, and housekeepers. The dialogue was entertaining and it was interesting seeing how to deal with these situations differently. Apparently there are separate leadership approaches to use when dealing with different kinds of people, from delegating, directing, coaching, to supporting. I can say that if I had known about this methodology useful when working in groups, high school projects would have been so much easier.

In the afternoon, we visited the topic of casinos. I’m a frequenter of Vegas, but had no idea about Atlantic City, NJ or Macau, which has surpassed Sin City as the gaming capital of the world. It was exciting hearing familiar big names such as MGM & Mirage, the Harrah’s/Caesars conglomerate (including Bellagio, Paris, Bally’s, Rio, Flamingo, Planet Hollywood, and more), and most of all, the Wynn & Wynn Encore all of which I’ve stayed in or visited. The latter is a brand new luxury property, in which I last stayed over Christmas Break and remains my favorite hotel to date.

On the other hand, I had never heard much about the Native American casinos outside of Cache Creek and Thunder Valley commercials. Harrah’s Caesars recently opened the hugely successful Harrah’s Cherokee, which was one of the focuses from today’s presentation.

Casinos are a fascinating and variable segment of the hotel industry. While some are focused on being a hotel with a casino, others are “casino hotels” and even give away free luxury rooms to turn in the big profits from high-stakes gambling, big-spending loyalty customers.

Before I go to bed, I thought I’d share one of my side adventures. During lunch break today, I adopted some tadpoles. The fattest one’s named Jimmy. They will be returning to the pond tomorrow.