Assistant Assistant Manager

Part Four - Walk This Way

Since the main thing is a full house, just like airlines, hotels have to utilize some sort of mathematical system that makes sense out of percentages, odds, history, and the statistical probabilities of chance as these pertain to the ratios of reservations, cancellations, and no shows.

In simple terms, you have to overbook the reservations every single day in order to sell out the rooms. If you don’t do this you will always have vacancy.

It is far more complex than an educated guess, you have to try to be precise, sometimes you get it wrong, and a guaranteed reservation isn’t.

When overbooking backfires there is an industry strategy for high end swanky hotels known as “walking”. There is nothing pedestrian about it.

When more guests with reservations show up than rooms that are vacant, the procedure is to make reservations for these guests at hotels that are rated equivalent or better. The hotel that is doing the “walking” pays for the room at the new hotel for the entire stay, and pays for a limousine to drive the guests to their new unexpected digs.

This action combined with the appropriate apology is usually met with acceptance. It is a very nice gift for causing someone an inconvenience, and often the hotel they are being “walked” to is a more glamorous place to stay, and it’s going to be free! Once they realize that fact, they stop complaining.

This is supposed to be a very rare thing, and my experience showed this to be the case, until the week that it wasn’t.

Like lots of bad things in life, this event was caused by human beings who were unable to comprehend possible downstream consequences of their decisions and actions.

Six months before the “big disaster event” there was a previous “lesser disaster event” caused by the IT department. They had been having problems running the end of day for the computer systems server. Nothing was being saved from the days work to the hard drive or the mirror drive.

It was all just hanging there in limbo. These problems had been apparent to them for over one week, but they kept it a secret amongst themselves, and didn’t tell management or retain outside assistance.

They kept trying to fix it themselves until they tried something that destroyed all of the unsaved data. Something like eleven days worth.

At this point they had to confess because every single transaction from all those days was vaporized. All of the financials, accounts payable, accounts receivable, employee payroll, and last but not least… the reservations.

While this was before the internet, it was San Francisco and Silicon Valley held sway. The Hotel Corporation had already been convinced to eliminate using paper records whenever possible.

IT confessed late one afternoon on a day where I was working the swing shift. They had to admit it because employees were beginning to notice something was wrong, like the computer system showed 100% vacancy! There was no one staying in the hotel, so who the hell were all those people!?

The General Manager called an emergency meeting in the Board Room that was attended by all managers, assistant managers, and assistant assistant managers for every department in the hotel, and the IT guys who did the deeds that caused this misery.

After he had finished chewing out IT, giving them an utterly appropriate public humiliation, he moved on to his plan, which in retrospect was really the only sort of thing that could be done at this point.

He crafted a letter to all of the guests in the hotel to inform them of the problem. Please bear in mind that at this point he didn’t know who they were, how long they had been there, or what sort of amenities they had made use of such as room service, long distance telephone services, facsimile services, bar tabs, restaurants, etc.

He was bluntly honest about this terrible situation and apologized profusely for all of the missed telephone calls, which were apparently in some cases causing marital discord. Really now, if the computer system doesn’t show the guest, how is the telephone operator supposed to connect the call to a room where they aren’t staying?

Worst of all, the letter informed all of the guests that checking out was going to have to be done on the honor system. Basically, we have no idea how much money you owe us, please play nice and honest, and we will charge you accordingly.

Secretaries made 500 copies of this letter, one for each room or suite, because we didn’t know if we had any vacant rooms. In the middle of the night I took the elevator to the top floor and slid them under the doors on my way downstairs floor after floor like some suit wearing after hours spook.

It was amazing how almost no one had any long distance telephone calls, bar tabs, restaurant, or room service. It was as though a religious organization had been occupying the premises while fasting and practicing their vows of silence.

Some guests simply took the opportunity to exit the premises incognito and a rather large sum of money was definitely lost or squandered depending on how you choose to look at it.

The “big disaster event” lay in waiting like a forgotten unexploded mine field.

Some background so you get the gist of how something so ridiculously stupid could actually happen and catch everyone by complete surprise. That is, if some of them weren’t hiding. The hotel had many large ballrooms, meeting rooms, banquet rooms, reception rooms, conference rooms, and convention rooms. Sometimes, if the shindig was going to be particularly huge the outfit hosting it would rent all of these rooms.

This is what happened when a convention for Doctors booked itself for a week. Now I don’t mean pretentious people with PhD’s in any old thing who pompously present themselves as Dr. So and So. The sort of people who end a veiled question with a pause, comma, and the condescending inflected yes or no? I hate it when people do that.

I mean Medical Doctors, and in this case it was Surgeons.

Being a Surgeon is definitely a profession that can lend itself to pretense, but when I consider it, my only thought is SO WHAT?!

If you spent your days doing things to people that would kill them under less pristine circumstances, and instead of dying they get better, you just might develop a little ol’ attitude too.

The department that booked all of these convention rooms was separate from the room reservations department and they had their own computer system.

When the main system crashed and burned they didn’t say anything to the people in reservations about the Surgeons Convention that was booked six months out.

When the data panic occurred a couple of thousand room reservations were lost. This was obviously a bad thing. But they were spread out all over the place and could be managed by “walking”.

That said, the Surgeons Convention was for an entire week all at once, and there were over 300 room reservations confirmed that were now lost, plus the reservations department double booked every single one of them and then some without even realizing what they had done. None of us had a clue.

The avalanche began on the weekend before the convention with a steady trickle when people started to show up with what they believed to be their “guaranteed reservations” that were nowhere to be found in the computer.

The first few times were curious, but not alarming. As that Saturday wore on, there were more and more of them until it was undeniable that something was going very wrong.

By the evening, we had a lobby filled with angry tired doctors that we were desperately trying to place in other hotels. At first we were able to “walk” them to the equivalent or better hotels within walking distance.

The Saint Francis, Mark Hopkins, Fairmont, and Stanford Court. As soon as we told them that we were paying for everything, these individuals calmed down and were on their merry way.

Some of them even had a sense of humor about it. Most did not.

When we ran out of those kinds of rooms was when it turned ugly. We had to start looking at lesser alternatives, but the angry mob had heard us finding luxury accommodations for their predecessors, and wanted the same.

At this point it started to resemble a vicious and stupid high school play about trench warfare. The space behind the front desk being the trench that sort of protected the staff, while not from insults or curses, or threats of personal lawsuits, at least from a punch in the face.

A very strange thing about all of this was that we had to have the same exact argument over and over again with brand new different people who had been standing there listening to us have the argument with the person in line right before them. Lots of these people had heard us have the argument dozens of times while they waited their turn. This was truly a puzzlement and a bundle of insult.

Did they really imagine that we were just bullshitting all of the people before them, and that we really had plenty of rooms and just liked to quarrel?

The Hotel Manager who was directly under the GM for authority was from New York City and was a Vietnam Vet from the Tet Offensive.

He had a large map of Vietnam on his office wall, with colored pushpins stuck in all of the places he had fought during the war.

In the habit of making Assistant Assistant Managers have dinner with him, the entire time he would talk about what happened to him in Vietnam and how utterly bored he was by his life ever since. This was twenty years later.

Dinners that everyone hoped to avoid after the first experience, and were a running misery joke about whose turn was going to be next.

Under normal circumstances he was difficult and intimidating. But during this debacle was the first time I had seen him shine. The son of a bitch was actually enjoying himself! Something was happening that wasn’t boring!

He was the only executive who placed himself on the front line of abuse with those of us on staff, and he did so for the entire week it transpired.

That week we gave the bum’s rush to over 300 physicians and it was his idea of fun. I have to admit that I was very glad he was on my side that week.

The lesser alternatives for “walking” were in a state of continuous decline and having run out of mid range options, things like a Hyatt or a Howard Johnson, we moved on to motor inns and motels. Quickly exhausting that option too.

Before we knew it we were begging flop houses for rooms that were far away and would require daily chauffeur service to and from the convention. We told them that they wouldn’t have to stay in that strange hotel with the junkies for the entire convention. That we would upgrade them to a nicer room somewhere else as soon as there was a checkout. In the meantime look at the bright side, there are liquor stores and strip clubs next door to the less than desirable digs we’ve stuck you in. Temporarily.

We tried to convince doctors who were total strangers to share rooms with each other with roll away beds and cots. Until we ran out of those too.

It was a twisted sort of game as though Chess, Solitaire, House of Cards, and Monopoly were to be played simultaneously on a Ouija Board set on a 78 rpm turntable, where the rules can be capriciously changed at anyone’s whim.

Saturday turned into Sunday and Sunday was the same. Sunday turned into Monday morning and Monday morning was the same. By Monday afternoon the convention had begun and we had “walked” everyone concerned.

Next would be guests not affiliated with the convention who also thought they possessed a “guaranteed reservation”. No matter, we were used to it.

Please stay tuned. To be continued shortly…