I worked for this lousy company for eight months last year, doing lousy work, getting paid a lousy salary ($8 per hour would have been fine if I didn't have a college degree, alas I have a BS with honors), and getting treated like crap from management and other employees the entire time.
When it all comes down to it, this hotel uses shady business practices, cuts costs, and pockets the rest. We were required to call other hotels undercover during the course of the night to find out what the going rate and occupancy was, and then adjust accordingly.
In addition to that, management never treated housekeepers well, and passed off much of the housekeeping work to us, the front desk staff, for no additional pay. Again, a cost-cutting scheme by the management, and more often than not laundry never got completely done and rooms were left dirty because of lack of sufficient hours and duties to go around.
Somewhere, something always seemed to go wrong, and I got phone calls and complaints all night, which I honestly understood why. Malfunctioning locks, plumbing/light bulb issues, among other things. Maintenance/management only ever bandaged the problem, again, in the name of cutting costs.
The owners weren't much better. The GM had to pay for stuff out of her own pocket because the owners would not properly reimburse her for costs of upkeep. It got to the point where she put her foot down and said she wasn't going for this. I don't blame her for this.
I dealt with a belligerent guest in September, and it escalated into a case of the police having to be called. I ended up getting terminated for protecting my own butt, as I felt extremely threatened.
There's no way I'd pay $79.99 for one of those tiny little rooms, and I always felt like I was screwing customers out of their hard-earned money charging them that much. $89.99 for a tiny double-bed room is more than outrageous. Of course, I always gave breaks from the rack rate and never offered the rack rate because of this, and I can admit that now, but I still feel that at $10 off rack I was screwing people.
The bottom line: this hotel is overpriced and has management and owners that care about nothing other than profit. They don't really care about you. I'm off to bigger and better things now, and I'll be back in Abilene this December, but I can tell you where I won't be staying.
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