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Confessions of a hotel room service employee
HAVE you ever snapped at a hotel worker for delivering your meal too late, failed to answer their repeated knocks on the door or forgotten to put the food tray out when you’ve finished eating?
Well you won’t be in their good books!
A former Australian hotel employee, who worked in Sydney for two years, has dished the dirt to travel website trivago.com.au, revealing what goes on behind the scenes when you order room service and the guest habits that need to stop. Right now.
What does the room service role involve and is it stressful?
Yes! You have to do a lot of manual labour. You’re somehow supposed to master dealing with customers, running functions, taking food out to the restaurant, delivering meals up to the rooms, answering room service orders on the phone and cleaning all at the same time.
During peak season I would sometimes do up to 18 hours per shift, occasionally without breaks, which was quite full on!
And your nutrition goes out the window. Because you work during everyone else’s eating times, it can really mess with your own eating habits. You tend to not eat as much, and soft drinks and coffee can become diet staples as they’re always in proximity.
Maid with room service tray
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What are the strangest requests or complaints you’ve received?
I’ve had many strange orders! There was the time a woman spent about 10 minutes detailing her tomato allergy and insisted that tomatoes must not be put in her side salad. She then proceeded to order a penne pasta with Napoletana sauce. I explained that Napoletana sauce is tomato-based, but she said she’s not allergic to tomatoes if they’re blended.
Then there are the guests who would do anything for a freebie. One time a guest called me to their room after ordering a pizza and showed me that there was hair all over it: big, long black curly hair. Funny thing was our chefs and staff had either blonde hair or none at all, so it was clearly the guest’s hair. Of course I wasn’t allowed to accuse her of lying, so I had to apologise and ask if there was anything I could do to resolve the issue. Her response was “a bottle of Dom Perignon” (champagne priced at about $200). In the end we gave her a bottle of more reasonably priced sparkling wine.
Mmmm ... still feel like that pizza tonight? Source: ThinkStock
What are the most annoying things that hotel guests do?
Most guests are quite nice and you usually only deal with them for a short period of time. However, you’d be surprised at the outrageous things that can happen in the space of just a couple of minutes!
One of worst things is when you knock repeatedly on someone’s door to no response, so you eventually leave, only to have the guest complain later on that they never received their food. Having to wait a long time for someone to come to the door is also hard because the trays are so heavy. You could take a trolley with you sometimes, but management frown upon it because it looks better when you’re holding the meal in your hands.
A lot of guests have yelled at me because their meal took too long to be delivered. It’s unfair because room service staff don’t prepare the food, they are just delivering it. So please don’t shoot the messenger.
It’s also annoying when guests don’t put the trays outside once finished with their meal. Management insist that we collect all room service trays before finishing our shifts. If the trays aren’t left outside the rooms, you have to go knocking on the doors. So you’d either get a grilling from management for not having all the trays returned, or from the guests for disturbing their evening. If the trays were just left outside the door it would save so much hassle!
Did you ever accidentally witness raunchy acts?
I once had a man answer the door completely naked and he didn’t seem the slightest bit fazed. He just said thanks, took his food, signed his receipt and closed the door. It was so hard to act normal, as I was flighting the urge to burst into laughter.
I also walked in on a couple having sex once. I knocked and knocked for so long, called “room service” many times and then opened the door to quite a sight. They completely freaked out and told me to just leave the food outside. You’d think if you’d just ordered room service you would at least restrain yourselves until the food was delivered!
Room service can get raunchy, in unexpected ways. Source: ThinkStock
Do hotel employees ever seek revenge on rude guests?
You’re constantly being watched by management so it can be tricky to enact revenge, but I would do small things like add full cream milk to their cereal order when they requested skim, or only give them one butter block for their toast when they specified two. People who are rude to hotel staff are usually very pedantic types, and I knew the little things like that would really annoy them. Those situations sometimes ended up causing more work for me though, as they’d contact me to fix the issues — karma I guess!
What were the other staff members in the hotel like?
I enjoyed working with the hotel bartenders and receptionists, but there was hostility between back-of-house and front-of-house workers. For example, the chefs assumed all service staff are stupid, just as service staff saw the chefs as rude, crude and arrogant.
It was difficult to work with them sometimes, especially with guest requests. It could be something as simple as “can I please have a side of tomato sauce with my burger?” and for some reason it would be the biggest and most annoying thing anyone could ask for. Of course the service staff were the ones who were shouted at. Whenever a guest asked for a small favour like that it used to make me cringe because I knew I had to prepare myself for an angry confrontation with a chef to make sure the request was carried out.
What are the tips like?
In Australia tips for room service aren’t too fantastic, but if the guests are from high-tipping countries like the US, they are usually generous. A lot of people don’t know that at some hotels if tips are given by credit card or charged to the room, staff members generally don’t receive them and the money just goes to the hotel. So if you want the staff to have the money, tip with cash!
Remember to leave your tray outside the door. Source: ThinkStock
