Part 2 Omni Hotel - Customer Service? Yeah....

The next morning we are awakened by family calling. We are there for a wedding so there are countless family and friends staying at the hotel as well. I called to "Guest Services" and request a full bed change. Linens, pillows, blanket & Cover. She asks why, I tell her why. I'm very nice about it. I explain we will be down for breakfast for an hour or two, then we'll be back in the room for an hour, then gone for several hours. I told them to take their time but it was important that it was done by 4pm as we had an evening wedding to prepare for.

Just as we are about to leave for breakfast, a room inspector shows up. These are folks that are generally 1 step above a room attendant. They inspect rooms to make sure they are ok for the guest and assist in training new hires. I invite her in, I show her the bed and she shakes her head and sighs. "We'll have this taken care of as soon as possible ma'am, I'm sorry" she says thru her missing teeth. Uggg.... No offense if you are missing your FRONT teeth and the ones not missing are black, but you do not belong talking to guests in a luxury (ahem) hotel.

We drive down to Williamsburg to do some shopping for a coupla hours (another post on that to follow) and we get back to the hotel around 4:10. Our room has not been touched. AND there are not one but TWO calls from Guest Services wanting to know if everything had been done to our satisfaction. HRUMPH!

Ok first off let me say that when we were walking to our room I noticed 4 doors in our section had been popped. This means that swing lock was engaged so you just had to push the door to have it open. Room Attendants and Houseman do this so they can quickly identify vacant rooms that need cleaned. Additionally I know that my sister who is down the hall had not been serviced. So, if my calculations were correct, the room attendant who had 19 rooms still had 4 VD's (vacant dirtys) and 2 OD's (occupied dirtys) which meant 6 rooms where still on her board to finish that day and it was almost 4:30. From what I was later told, Saturdays they quit at 5:30 which meant that the room attendant SHOULD have 2 rooms left, not 6. Industry standard is 22-27 minutes per room average.

So I call the front desk and what do they want to do? Send someone immediately. NO! I can't have someone now, there are 3 people that have to shower and be down stairs to a wedding in ONE hour. I told them to please send someone after 5:30. They agree and start to apologize, I hang up. 10 minutes later the door to the room opens then promptly shuts. Housekeeping has tried to enter the room without knocking - ohhhhhhh bad ju ju. 30 minutes after talking to the front desk, Housekeeping knocks on the door to service the room. At this point I'm ready to scream. I calmly tell her to come back after 5:30 and I shut the door.

Later that evening I'm walking by the front desk and I stop and talked to a young lady there who identifies herself as an acting AGM (Assistant General Manager) I tell her what happened and she assures me she will take care of it while I'm at the reception (held in the hotel) and they apologize yadda yadda yadda. We came back from the reception and sure enough the room was spotless and all the linens had been swapped out.

Now, you would think the story ends there but noooooooo. There would be no reason for this blog if that were the case.

The next morning we meet our family and friends for a breakfast function. I open the door and find the folio (bill) hanging on the doorknob. I look and find they have comp'd me for BOTH nites. WOW. While it doesn't make up for the bs of the last 30 hours or so, it sure was a nice treat. I stop at the front desk to find the same gal still there. I thank her for comp'ing both nights, she smiles and says "We have been trying to find that missing sheet for months and it kept hiding from us!" then she proceeds to apologize for the crappy service and then informed me that the 3rd floor was their training floor. I assume she's telling me this as a hotel insider and that she wouldn't share that info with just any guest. But hell what do I know?

Off we drive for thankfully 5 uneventful hours until we reach home.

Read Post #3 for the theft of an IPOD and the rest of the story.