How many are you???

Group check ins are great! Group check ins are easy and fast! Group check ins... can become a nightmare!This particular check in happened a few years ago. It was early in the afternoon of a nice saturday in summer, the sun was shining and I was on my way to a nice BBQ with friends. Ah... the perfect day was what I was thinking. Then my phone rang...My collegue, who was working alone (remember, group check ins are easy, so why have 2 receptionists work on this magnificent day?) called me asking if I could run down to the hotel to help him. Something was wrong with the group booking. I must admit I was somewhat relieved. My collegue was laughing and the hotel was on my way anyways. This couldn't be so bad. I arrived at the hotel in shorts, t-shirt and sunglasses, only to be met by a full entry hall, an angry GM and a laughing collegue. It was a hysterical laughing. A small detail I had missed over the phone...So what the hell had happened? The group arrived, my collegue started handing out keys and useful information. The problem was that at a certain point the prepared keys came to an end, but people kept coming to the reception asking for a room key. ??? was what appeared on my poor collegues head before he started getting nervous, called me and the GM and wondered how to get out of this situation. So I sat down in the backoffice in my very professional shorts and started reading the correspondence of the booking. It was quite thick and I wondered what could have gone wrong with so many written details. After a few minutes reading we noticed something strange: why would an agency use two different letterheads?

Very easy! It was not the same agency! So it were two different bookings, two different groups and one big common mess!

The only positive aspect was that we had enough free rooms. So we sent the rest of the guests to their rooms and in the new found calm we started looking for answers to our new questions: Who belongs to which group? Who is in which room? How are we going to calculate the amount for the bill? But most important: Who the was the Einstein who stapled the two reservations together?! The first three questions were not too hard to answer in the end. It just took some time. The last one will remain a big mystery until the end of time. Of course nobody had done it!I spend a good part of the afternoon checking in the group, cross checking number of guests, names, room numbers and in the end we managed to finish it all. We actually worked so well that the clients would thank us for the nice stay. No, not in a sarcastic way, in a truthful way!

And hey, it was even as fun as having a BBQ in the sun! Ok, this is a huge lie! At least my friends were nice enough to leave me a few ribs, sausages and a few cold beer that day! What is true though is that even though you know that you will never get payed for the extra time, people will continue asking of you to be flexible and work strange shifts, you even have to skip BBQs, it feels so damn good to come out well of such a sticky situation!