Putting the “Fair” in Fairmont Hotels

When you check into a hotel after a day of business travel and in advance of another one, all you want is for everything to just work. Here are all the things that didn’t just work in the 9 hours I spent at the Fairmont San Jose last night, between days of meetings at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale HQ:

• It’s not a good start to walk up to your room and find dirty room-service dishes outside the door - you spend the first 5 minutes uneasily checking out the room to make sure the previous tenant is really gone.
• The room is fine, but the absence of an alarm clock is a little unusual. . . so you set up a wakeup call, and (as I always do) a backup 15 minutes later.
• Is it normal for the housekeeper to charge into the room with barely a perfunctory knock before 7 a.m. - and before the first wake-up call? Your very first thought is, “Oh shit, they blew the wakeup call and I’ve overslept my meeting” - i.e., you wake up to an unpleasant adrenaline rush - and only then do you get annoyed that there’s a housekeeper in your room at 6:55 a.m.
• Then they blow the wakeup call, giving you three calls instead of two, at different intervals than requested.
• Just for fun, you step on the digital scale. . . and get “Err - Batt” on the display.
• As you get ready, naturally you call down to the valet stand to have them bring the car up. There is no answer, and it rolls to an operator, who only listens to the first three words you say before dumping you back into the same ringing line without so much as a “please hold”. You get some random lady’s voicemail, who doesn’t even have a proper outgoing message. Getting impatient, you try again three more times but get no pulse. So you plan to go down in person when you leave.
• Though you heard them noisily clearing the room-service dishes during the night, the newspaper sleeves are still there - so no today’s paper for you, only yesterday’s New York Times
• The guy at checkout is appropriately apologetic when you politely point out a few of the issues. He writes down your concerns but has no explanations for you, just a little foreshadowing on the next problem to come. . . .
• The valet line - where at least 15 people are waiting for their cars, some for as long as 45 minutes, while many of the cars are clearly visible right from the valet stand. People are complaining loudly and asking for the general manager, who is nowhere to be seen. Everyone in line is late for something, and the scene behind the desk is less organized than third-world post offices I have visited.
• Miraculously, your car arrives almost immediately after you get to the desk - presumably because you got in so late the night before - but in front of the now-livid line of other people.

Really, what’s so hard about this? The whole point of doing hospitality (or anything else) at scale and for demanding customers is to build systems so things don’t go wrong, and have back-up systems in place for when things inevitably do. It’s not like they didn’t know exactly how many people were parked in the garage the night before, and they could easily have a pleasant voicemail message automatically apologizing for the delay in the garage if someone called in sick and they couldn’t find a stand-in. And seriously, if you’re not going to check the batteries, don’t put electronic devices into rooms.  Who really needs a scale anyway?

Sure, Fairmont can slack a little given they’re in a booming convention town and are probably approaching a 100% occupancy rate, but it will eventually catch up with them. My team at Yahoo! sent over a dozen people to this hotel for a week during SES last month - and I can assure you we will be shopping around next time.