(In)hospitality Management

In the last week I have had to travel twice for work and doing so has made me cranky. I am now developing some thoughtware, and possibly an at-a-glance or a placemat, with instructions to the parties involved in making my trips miserable on how to make them less so in the future. Don’t worry, I will also produce a tri-fold and the requisite app. Let’s start with…

Hotel Proprietors

• Wifi should be wireless. And it should work. And it should not require me to talk to someone at some other location on some other continent for thirty minutes to get it to work. If I must resort to wired (shudder), at least let that wire be in a location that allows me to work with a good view of the TV and Gene Simmons Family Jewels.
• There should be cell phone service in your hotel. In this day and age, I should be calling home for free, not paying the $17 I paid to make sure that everyone has packed her snack for school tomorrow. Yes, now that we all bring our phones with us, you are losing out on those exorbitant phone fees, but you make up for it by charging us for the wifi. That doesn’t work. 
• The bedside clock should not be 5 hours off. Fixing this issue should not require you to send a member of your staff to my room to replace the clock. This happened, unbelievably enough, in both hotels I stayed at last week. Does no one else need to wake up at a specific time, or did the other guests just tell their colleagues, as they parted after dinner, “Meet you at 7 AM, plus or minus 5 hours?"
• The bed should not be situated right next to sliding glass doors that open onto the parking lot. Yes, sure, on the other side of the glass doors there is a dirty teeny tiny patio with a high cinder brick wall separating the room from the actual parking lot, but as far as I am concerned, that wall exists only to conceal a criminal as he slides the doors off their track and then slips into my room. Too much to ask, you say? At the very least, instruct your staff not to give these rooms to nervous New Yorkers; Ottumwa residents are less likely to be made anxious by this arrangement.  

Stay tuned for instructions to the airlines, including a request that klonopin be handed out at check-in for those flights on planes that seat fewer than 60 people.