This Whine Wednesday, I’d like to highlight a severe guest service and safety gap that many properties still haven’t found a solution for, which is housekeeping staff entering guest rooms unauthorized and unannounced.
I stayed at the Hyatt JDV property “Tommie Hollywood” in Los Angeles last weekend and aside from many other issues this property has, housekeeping entered my room at 9:40 am without knocking on the door.
It would have actually been great had the hotel provided a Do Not Disturb sign, but even that was obviously too much effort, so apparently, housekeeping feels emboldened to just barge into guestrooms without even bothering to knock on the door.
This presents problems on multiple fronts. For one, the most obvious: Privacy! A hotel room is a person’s temporary home, and there should be a full expectation of privacy. After all, you sleep, shower, change and live in the room.
Secondly, it’s about security. Guests keep valuable items in the room be it monetary or personal value attached to the property. Entering the guestroom without any announcement isn’t exactly a safe environment for a guest’s personal safety either. It’s actually crazy that this would happen.
In the very least a housekeeper should contact the front desk if they suspect a guest might have checked out and verify, not disturb the guest or – worse – simply walk into the room.
It’s a common protocol that any one of the hotel staff who enters the room has to knock on the door and announce who it is. Large chains like Hyatt even issue these instructions in their training and brand standard manual. Apparently, the JDV Tommie Hollywood hasn’t gotten the memo yet.
Not that this surprises me, the hotel still doesn’t serve breakfast at a restaurant and instead hands guests a paper bag downstairs at the lobby cafeteria, something they said two years ago would only be a Covid measure.
How does the hotel deal with such quality issues at the property?
Well for one, they don’t have a senior manager around to resolve problems which is already the first red flag. But even if that was the case, the fish always stinks from the head, and in the case of this hotel, it’s pretty obvious that management doesn’t care either.
I left there Sunday morning and asked that someone gets in touch with me either that same day or the next morning. Nothing happened. But I did get an email from the hotel containing a bill with parking charges that should have been waived for Globalist members.
The stay was also posted as non-qualifying to my account despite having used a World of Hyatt award night, requiring me to call Hyatt either way and then ripping them apart with a manager there, opening a file.
Then yesterday evening I get a voicemail from the cluster front office manager at the Thompson and Tommie Hollywood, Marianne, leaving me the general hotel phone number to call her back. Leave it aside for a moment that it took over 10 minutes of getting her on the phone as she “didn’t have a direct number or extension”, the way she misrepresented and downplayed what happened clearly showed a complete disregard for the situation and how bad the operations at this hotel complex really are. Shocking!
I ended the phone call without any resolution, it sometimes is best to just walk away when you already feel that whoever is placed in charge there is just looking for excuses rather than trying to improve and find solutions.
Conclusion
It’s a real problem to get proper hospitality staff these days and that not only reflects in service but also in management. North America is especially affected by this.
That being said, service at other Los Angeles hotels such as the Andaz, Intercontinental or Kimpton is usually fine but this property hasn’t gotten its act together since opening and without clear guidelines even for housekeeping on how to conduct business, it doesn’t paint a very promising picture either.
To prevent housekeeping from entering unauthorized always lock the doors manually where possible and if there is no DND sign call the front desk to request one. I failed to do either so I guess I’m at least partly to blame to prevent the hotel’s incompetence from playing out the way it did.