Re: Innkeeping: How late?

["Bubble Bubbleton" <bubblebubbleton@hotmail.com>]

I guess it's a call we all have to make at the time ... depending on how 
tired you are, whether you're feeling hospitable, if other guests are going 
to be woken, etc. Any new arrival is time-consuming and while it shouldn't 
be a chore to spend half an hour or so chatting with new guests or making 
them comfortable, if your mind is on your own warm bed, your heart just 
isn't really in it, and this can be clear to the guests themselves.

We had a couple who'd booked weeks in advance, and when asked for their 
arrival time, they said midday. Our usual check-in time is 3pm but we're 
flexible, so made a point of ensuring that particular room was ready for the 
guests by 11.30am. At 11.00pm, they phoned from their cellphone(!) to ask 
for directions, having ignored the map on our website, obviously. Well 
they'd been in town for hours, and were phoning after having had dinner. 
They then requested wine and proceeded to sit around and chat loudly for 
another hour before going to their room. Pissed off the other guests no end.

That leads me to a question perhaps others have faced - if you decide that a 
booking has become a no-show, and go to bed, you'd presumably tell them to 
go away if they eventually did turn up. But in this situation, would it be 
right to still charge them the no-show/cancellation fee, given they did 
actually show, albeit inconderately late?


>From: Frances Walker <sassybb@siu.edu>
>Reply-To: innkeeping@innkeeping.com
>To: innkeeping@innsite.com, PAII-Members@paii.org
>Subject: Innkeeping: How late?
>Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 22:30:29 -0500
>
>Last night (Saturday) we had a telephone call requesting a room for
>the night at 10:15 PM. We were full, so it wasn't a question of
>turning a guest away when we had an empty room. But I'm afraid I
>rather rudely said to him that I thought it was a little late to be
>deciding where he was going to spend the night. Then my husband and I
>had a discussion about whether we would (or should) have turned him
>away if we DID have a room available. What do other people do?
>
>Our B&B is about 5 miles out of town at the end of a gravel road, so
>our walk-in traffic is nil. My vision of him was that he has picked
>up someone in a bar and was looking for a bed. Am I being cynical? Or
>was I maybe just ready to go to bed myself.
>	-Frances
>Frances Walker, Sassafras Ridge Bed & Breakfast
>in the "front woods" 5 miles south of Carbondale IL
>mailto:sassafrasbb@go-illinois.com , see us at http://sassafrasbb.com
>phone 618/529-5261, fax 618/529-1901
>See all Illinois B&B Association members at http://go-illinois.com
>
>
>
>
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