Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
That's insane! If you'd pre-booked it, they should have had your room and key waiting for you. Then it doesn't matter if there's a system failure, you're already in your room and calling room service!
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It's actually not insane, depending upon the hotel and the technology.
Those I deal with have doors with electronic locks, and key cards that are generated at the front desk when the patron checks in. The reservation system must be up and running for the hotel to be
able to check in the guest, assign a room, and provide a key. (And except in special cases, rooms are not preassigned. The guest gets one that happens to be empty and meets the specifications made when the reservation was booked. Precisely which room that is is luck of the draw.)
A while back, I had fun at a hotel I deal with. I'm the chap who deals with the hotel on behalf of an event held there. The event takes place over a weekend. I come down to the venue on Thursday, and leave Monday.
I was in the lobby on Thursday afternoon, talking to the Meetings Director, who had paperwork for me to sign. As we were talking, the lights went out. They came back on again in a few moments. While he was in his office trying to print out the papers for me to sign, the lights went out again, and
didn't come back on. The local electric utility had a failure that took out a couple of thousand customers in the area, including the hotel.
The front desk could not access their system to check in customers, and that was only the tip of the iceberg. The elevators weren't running, and people already checked in on upper floors had problems. The phone system was disrupted, varying between "You can't call into or out of the hotel at all" and "You can only call the main hotel number. Direct dialing of specific extensions doesn't work."
And the failure knocked out the feed from the hotel's ISP, so Wifi and Internet access were out.
Power was back by Friday, but all of the other problems that occurred in the wake of the power failure weren't finally fixed until Saturday evening.
I spent a lot of time explaining what happened to folks attending my event, with emphasis on "The event and the hotel are doing the best they can. Complain to the local utility who had the outage. But stand in line - we are only one of
many sites affected."
Once folks understood it was a cascade failure caused by a utility power outage, they were sympathetic, but was the opposite of fun while it lasted.
I told folks after the fact I spent the weekend dealing with giant economy sized helpings of stupid. The only saving grace was that it wasn't my event's or the hotel's stupid.
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Dennis