Wednesday, April 26, 2006

It seemed my day of travel to Chicago would be flawless. I took BART from Concord to SFO without incident. My flight on United boarded on time and, because my upgrade cleared, I had a seat in the last first-class row on a Boeing 757 (my favorite plane for 3-4-hour flights). I got my meal choice. The flight went without incident (I was even able to write an entire chapter of the book I’m working on) and landed exactly on time. I took the Blue Line from O’Hare into the City and it took only 20 minutes to walk to my hotel, the Hyatt Regency, from the Clark/Lake station.

But trouble awaited. After standing in a fairly long check-in line, I was greeted by the front desk clerk, LeRon, who spent a few minutes looking me up on the system only to inform me my reservation had been canceled—and the hotel was sold out.

I explained that I had not canceled my reservation, that I was a keynote speaker at a conference at the hotel the next morning. LeRon vanished into the offices behind the front desk. I called my contact with the organization hosting the conference, who said she would call the hotel conference manager with whom she was working. It wasn’t necessary. LeRon came back with a room—a junior suite. I’m not sure if that was a gesture to make up for the inconvenience of the cancelation that should not have happened or if it was the only room available. It turns out somebody had mis-entered my name (I was Sheila Holt), and when no such name matched the list of conference attendees, the reservation was dumped. But the hotel made it right quickly, and LeRon was a model of front-desk efficiency and graciousness. It should be so at all hotels.

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Posted by Shel in • Hotels
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