Snowman On Fire

I travel quite a bit for my day job, and I’ve developed certain hotel preferences over time. In the course of managing my son’s hockey team, I’ve also booked large blocks of rooms for tournaments and have seen the entire range of customer service. In the past week, I’ve lived at both ends of that spectrum.

This morning I checked out of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, FL. Sometime around 3:30am, the fire alarm tripped and woke up the entire hotel. Upon checkout, the front desk manager gave me a discount on last night’s lodging rate, as compensation for getting all of about 2 hours of sleep. I didn’t have to ask, I didn’t have to plead my case, they just took care of their customer. Guess where I’ll be staying next time I’m in the Ft. Lauderdale area? This is how you build a brand. It’s one reason why I’m loyal to Hard Rock Cafes (consistently good quality anywhere in the world), and now I’m loyal to their hotel chain as well. Not surprising when you consider that the idea of rock memorabilia at the HRC started with the London cafe hanging Eric Clapton’s guitar over his favorite bar stool as a measure of permanent hospitality.

Rewind a week to a hockey tournament in the nation’s capital, where I was hosting 15 families in a Marriott Suites hotel. In the course of three days, we had families assigned to smoking rooms (with 11- and 12-year old hockey players in them), contradicting the rooming list I had been given. The phones went unanswered more than half of the time. There was no bell service to be found, so the lobby became a collection of hockey bags and orbiting parents and siblings. Typicallty, when you land a large group at a hotel, the hotel’s sales manager sends a token “thank you” for your business - a fruit basket, some chocolate, something low-cost and high-carb to say “We value your business.” What I got was arguments from the front desk about room assignments; what I didn’t get was any contact from someone in a position of authority or sales. I’ve waited a week to hear back from the hotel, and the silence isn’t just deafening, it’s indicative of a brand problem.

What Marriott told me, implicitly, is they could care less about my business. Perhaps this is a result of Marriott franchising their hotels, instead of owning them outright; perhaps it’s merely a local management problem over a holiday weekend when the hotel was oversold. No matter the cause, the effect is the same for me: My loyalty to Marriott has gone negative.