Pick-A-Day

June 2008
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Incident and Response

Incident Outline

Event: A previous guest or hotel employee set up the television in my guest room, room 107, to automatically turn on at 05:00.

Discovery: 05:00, when TV turns on while I was sleeping.

Desired/Expected Response From Hotel Clerk:

Me: The television in my room turned on at 5 this morning while I was sleeping!

Hotel Clerk: Oh my! My deep apologies, I will inform the cleaning and technical staff to find out what happened. I’m sorry it woke you up. Can I offer you a free breakfast?

Me: Yes. It wasn’t a big deal, but it did wake me up.

Actual Hotel Clerk Response:

Me: The television in my room turned on at 5 this morning while I was sleeping!

Hotel Clerk: We didn’t do it!

Me: Errr…

I actually had to tell the clerk at the hotel that the first thing she should have done was apologize for the incident occurring. Her total inability to apologize ended up making me angry. After I forced her to utter something resembling an apology, I tried prompting her to offer me token compensation for my lost sleep, but she never figured it out.

Hotel Summary:

The Quentin Design Hotel, located at Kalckreuthstraße 12, in Berlin, is in an excellent location for the gayborhood, but as it is a design hotel, there are many subtle design flaws. For example, the door on my shower had big gaps, thus water flooded the bathroom floor. It’s physically impossible to not get the floor soaking wet. (And the bathmat couldn’t be right outside the door, unless you are wafer thin, something I am not.)

Despite a competent, friendly, and nice clerk who checked me in at night, the clerk in the morning was incompetent, unfriendly, and unhelpful. Before I approached the desk, I had decided that appropriate compensation would have either been a free breakfast at the hotel or a small (~10-15€) discount off a future stay.

Recommendation: Don’t stay at the Quentin Design Hotel. Berlin has hundreds of hotels; many worse than this turkey, but a lot that are far better—even around the corner in the gayborhood.

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