Have you joined the Hilton Horrors program?

26 Apr 2016

We signed up last night in Maidstone. Our local accountant’s association has speaker meetings there most months, and for some time they’ve left the car park barrier open after the meeting to expedite our departure.

Last night somebody at the Hilton decided to change this practice (or failed to over-ride ‘normal’ practice). Fair enough, but they didn’t tell us. This resulted in an enormous queue snaking from the car park around the hotel to the barrier.

As the queue lengthened, inching forward very slowly, the melee was exacerbated by Hilton guests and diners joining the entourage.

I wondered why this was such a problem and why the hotel management hadn’t addressed it – leaving the barrier up for 5 or 10 minutes would have cleared the problem easily. When we arrived at the barrier our ticket was rejected, we pushed the contract button and were quizzed and then scolded by one of the Hilton’s customer service representatives who then allowed that she would let us out ‘this time’. She asked for the number on our ticket, went away for a time and then came back and instructed us to re-submit our ticket. The barrier rose, and we left, 30 minutes after leaving the meeting.

Now it may be that nobody with any authority or understanding of customer service was present on the evening of Monday, 25th April 2016 at 8 PM, or they may have been distracted by the lady who had received a shock from her room hair dryer shortly before this, but the staff member haranguing us through the barrier intercom might have realised that after 5 or 10 or 20 minutes that something was wrong and that customers were being un-necessarily inconvenienced. Did she have authority to over-ride the ticket barrier? Clearly yes. Did the Hilton gain any income via her antics (it has to be assumed that the Duty manager was fully aware)? Absolutely not. Were function visitors and hotel guests avoidably inconvenienced? Clearly, yes.

This is a really good example of a “jobs worth” employee plodding through their job and Duty Management not even doing that. Good customer service is essential in the hospitality industry, and sometimes that means additional effort, especially with difficult customers. In this case, the Maidstone Hilton went to considerable and pointless effort to upset a large number of customers for no reason that I can see other than management sloth.