Poorly Trained Hotel Workers

I’m in Atlanta to speak at the IQPC Recruiting & Staffing Summit annual conference. I arrived last night at a nice but moderately priced all suites hotel. I selected it, in part, because it offered free wireless Internet access. After checking in, I turned on my computer and could see through WinXP that there were half a dozen wireless networks and most of them had strong signals. I tried to connect to several of them but could not establish a connection. I called the front desk. The only help they provided was to give me two toll free numbers to the wireless Internet service provider. I called those numbers. They both rang to the same place and after holding for several minutes I was only offered the opportunity to leave a message. I did so and then went to get dinner.

I returned to my room 45 minutes later. No return call. I called again. The service provider answered the phone this time. I told the customer service rep that I had left a message 45 minutes earlier so he could delete that from their queue if they had one. He could have cared less. He asked me for my room number, told me which network to connect to, and it worked. It was that easy. So why couldn’t the front desk have a sheet of paper with the same information, or why couldn’t the networks be named so that guests could figure it out themselves, or why couldn’t the hotel have a sheet of paper in each room with the instructions?
I’m a frequent traveler and, while I wouldn’t call myself a techie, I am much more technically adept than a typical traveler. Yet I experience problems like this at about half of the hotels I stay at, and the problem seems to always boil down to poorly trained front desk staff. Would it be that hard to provide them with at least some information for wireless users? Perhaps a book that is organized by the type of problem so that the front desk worker could flip to the appropriate page, walk the guest through the solution, and then refer them to another person if that doesn’t work. At least the guest would know that the hotel cared enough to try to solve the problem.
Steven Rothberg, President and Founder
CollegeRecruiter.com