After studying hospitality at a Swiss Hotel management school then working in high-end hotels and restaurants for over a decade I have a lot of thoughts on this subject. This post is good but misses something important. People over profit. Employees behind the front desk of a hotel, and probably many other retail/hospitality settings, often endure tremendous verbal abuse from irate guests. When a man calls down screaming and cursing because to AC unit wont keep the room at 68 degrees when its 110 outside! "I am sorry sir, let me take $100 off your rate and give you free breakfast" is never an appropriate response. People have learned that throwing fits gets them free shit. Rule #1 Don't scream and curse at me and I will give you much more! There is a fine line for sure. Guests may be spending lots of money in your establishment and certainly have expectations for you to meet. If all expectations are not met then the customer feels gypped. One trick then is just getting the guest to arrive with expectations you can actually fulfill! If the guest is living in a dream world from the beginning you will have problems. Even then most problems can be handled with an adult conversation and without the abuse that often happens in these settings. As a supervisor, nearly every night I had to step in on a situation not because my employees couldn't handle it but because I didn't want them to go through that abuse alone. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore. Maybe it just wasn't for me but the fake smile plastered on my face seemed even more disingenuous every month. So, I quit. If I ran a hotel many guests would be asked not to come back because of their behavior. Unfortunately that hotel would then probably fail.
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