Monday, September 19, 2005

I checked into the Marriott Courtyard Medical Center in San Antonio, which is undergoing major renovation. They had called in advance to warn me that the hotel was in a state of construction, which was great. The problem came after I checked in. I had asked the desk clerk if the room I had been given still had working high-speed Internet access. (I had to record my podcast the next morning, which requires a Skype connection.) I was assured it did.

I got to my room, and unpacked, set up my recording equipment, connected the Ethernet cable to the laptop and...nothing. I rebooted. I checked to make sure the cable was jacked in to the wall. Still nothing. I called the front desk. “We’ll send an engineer right up,” I was told. Ten minutes later, my phone rang. “Actually, you should call iBahn, the service provider,” I was told. So I did. After a few minutes, the tech support agent told me, “There’s a known issue with the Internet connection in your room. It hasn’t worked for a while.” In fact, there was a whole range of rooms—everything higher than 229—that had no high-speed connectivity. I had to call the front desk and get moved to a new room.

Why wouldn’t the front desk know about a known issue? I’m a Marriott fan, so this was an unusual occurrence, but having to repack was still frustrating. If there’s a known issue, and a customer specifically asks, desk clerks should look it up and deal with it at check-in, not wait until the guest discovers what has already been discovered.

Posted by Shel in • Hotels
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