EPTPart 2
Sales teams are a mandatory part of hotel business. I have worked at properties with teams of 1 person as well as nationally recognized (by Marriott International) teams. You have on site sales, corporate level sales, business sales, leisure sales, and celebration sales. They are the people that get your name out to the community and bring in the big business.
What they don't tell you though is that while necessary, they make lives for every other department a living hell. Sometimes for the greater good. I once had a pharmaceutical company in house that filled up 89% of our rooms with guests. The other 10% of rooms were still used by the group were required for moving furniture in and out of eachother to create an additional 24 meeting rooms within our hotel for the group. The logistics of finding space in your hotel to strip beds, chairs, desks, tvs and all other furniture is almost impossible. But a salesperson will always tell you "the answer is Yes if you can afford it"
But, sometimes sales teams make bonehead desicions. My philosophy on the relationship between the guest service departments and the sales department is that Sales gets the money and guests into the hotel. It is our job in the front to keep everyone just happy enough to not lose money via compensation and loss of guests.
At my first major hotel our sales team struck a goldmine for a contract. They teamed up with the NHL and became THE place for every visiting team to stay (we later lost two teams due to some....issues) and as they departed our property on game day, their contract stipulated that the team does not depart their rooms until 6 pm. Hotels are tricky places to predict, but it seems fairly easy to plan ahead to not have those rooms in inventory as housekeeping leaves at 3 PM. However, this was our first year and sometimes details get overlooked.
In the industry there is one day a year that if it falls in a weekend, you can guarantee that A)Everyone will be arriving early, and that B) you will be sold out, and that is Valentine's Day. When we had people arriving at noon and having to tell them their rooms would not be vacated until 6:00 PM you can imagine the (understandable) outrage. Once management (finally) picked up on the clusterfuck that was our lobby we went into panic mode and the kitchen cooked up appetizers while managers walked around with complimentary champagne. It didn't fix the problem but free alcohol usually helps. I had 3 agents that afternoon and night cry at various times due to the stress and all the yelling that occurred due to no fault of their own.
After this you would think we wouldn't mess this up again. Sure enough the following year we had the same occurrence but with a wedding that the sales team had guaranteed early arrival for.
Story 2-B
Understandable event for a hotel that had only been opened for 2 months at the time, details get overlooked. However at my most recent property which opened in the 70s and most of the staff has been at for over a decade, you would think these hiccups would get worked out. Well this hotel managed to oversell the hotel by 60 rooms. We opened ourselves (and booked) 345 rooms for a hotel that has under 290 rooms. Often hotels oversell by 1-2% just like airlines and bank on non-arrivals...as you can imagine overbooking by 20% in the week of causes some problems.
Usually when a hotel oversells and has no more rooms they do a Walk to another comparable hotel. We pay the guest's room for them as well as their travel. However in cases where almost the entire city is sold out and you need to walk 60 rooms, you can imagine the expenses incurred for this hiccup. Needless to say the executives cracked some skulls in the sales office regarding this. Contracts were broken, guests showed up at the wrong properties and generally everyone hated us on their way out.
A day in the life of the front desk.
