As a former hotel receptionist, I received requests and questions from guests that often left me baffled. One in particular became the most annoying, and most people do it
Receptionists are at the heart of a hotel, handling reservations, addressing guest inquiries, and supporting other departments. But there’s one question that is instantly frustrating, and it’s more common than you might think.
I spent around four years working on the front desk of a hotel, and during that time, I gained a real insight into the hospitality industry from the good, the bad, and the ugly. One of our most popular phone calls was, unsurprisingly, to make a reservation, whether for an overnight stay or dinner at one of the two restaurants.
Friday nights, in the hotel and two restaurants, were often fully booked. The weekends were the busiest times for every staff member in every department, with a buzz and a hint of overwhelming stress seeping through the corridors as we did our best to make the guests’ experience as smooth as possible.
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As front-of-house staff, the often overwhelming demand for tables in the restaurant and rooms for the night landed on us. We’d have people calling up on a Friday afternoon asking for a table in the cosy pub, or attempting to book a last-minute staycation over a weekend.
We’d always politely explain that we were fully booked, whether in the restaurant or hotel, but they’d inevitably reply in the same way. And it went a little something like this:
Me: ‘I’m sorry we’re fully booked in the restaurant tonight’. Them: ‘Don’t you have any tables?’ Me: ‘No, I’m sorry, it’s a Friday night, every table is booked’. Them: ‘Can’t you squeeze us in anywhere?’
It was bewildering how many people would ask these questions, as if we could magically add an extra table and chairs to an already packed restaurant. More often than not, people would fail to understand the concept of reservation times.
Frequently, we might only have had a table free at 5.30pm or 9pm, both of which are awkwardly inconvenient. Yet, people would always push for the time they desired, not understanding how table turnovers work and the running of a restaurant. After all, 90 people can’t sit down all at once to eat at 7pm in a restaurant that only seats 45 at a time.
And it didn’t just happen for restaurant bookings. After explaining to would-be customers that the hotel was fully booked all weekend, we would get the response: ‘Don’t you have any rooms available?’ To which we’d reply, ‘I’m sorry it’s fully booked’. But that wouldn’t stop them.
I had people explain that they wouldn’t mind being in the smallest room, or squeezing their family of five into a room only suitable for double occupancy. While it’s always worth asking, to some extent, these questions became irritating. It was as if those on the other end of the line thought we were making it up.
Hotels and restaurants really do get fully booked, and no matter how much they want to cater to you, sometimes there really is no way around it.
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