Page 17 - ARUBA TODAY

LOCAL Monday 23 deceMber 2019
A17

Hotel

Hustle

Column by: Shanella Pantophlet
Behind the scenes

ORANJESTAD — I recently celebrated 9 years at work and with that comes time to reflect on the experiences I’ve had in that time. One of the
most important lessons I learned during my tenure is that you can’t please everyone. Don’t get me wrong, I understand and empathize with ev-
eryone who had to spend quite a bit of money to get to Aruba, then the whole travel day and exhaustion on top of that. The last thing anyone
needs after a long flight is for their one week of vacation is for something to go wrong at the hotel. It’s going to be frustrating, but it doesn’t mean
the problem can’t be resolved.

I think being that I work for a timeshare this can other hand we have those who tend to see of the resort. We aren’t just sitting around hop-
be a bit trickier than at a transient hotel. If the this as an opportunity to try and milk as much ing you’ll forget and not bother us. We want
room they had you assigned to has an issue compensation as possible out of the resort. everyone to have a good experience and
they’ll just put you in another one that fits your The general rule we have is if it’s something given the opportunity we do our best to fix the
reservation and honestly unless it happened beyond our control we will relocate you to problem.
while you were in the room you’d be none the an equal or better view and offer our sincer- My lesson learned on the instances when we
wiser. We in the timeshare business don’t have est apologies. If an issue arose due to our own are at fault is that in some cases it doesn’t
that luxury, especially when it comes to owner mistakes then we measure out the severity of matter how much you’ve done to resolve the
weeks. I can’t even count how many times we the issue at hand and determine our course of problems and get the guest back on their va-
have had to make emergency changes to a action. cation, they still won’t be satisfied. Those un-
room and then had to deal with the fallout. I satisfied guests turn into a negative Facebook
understand you have an emotional and finan- Of course the injured party doesn’t know what or TripAdvisor reviews and a flurry of questions
cial attachment to your room, but if there is all goes on behind the scenes. Your complaint and negativity from others, who have only
a burst pipe and water everywhere there’s no basically turns into us tracing back where the been given one perspective without the minor
way I can let you stay in that room. breakdown in communication happened, details. It’s very convenient how all the resorts
why it happened and what should we do to efforts to fix the issue are usually left out of the
Reactions vary per person and most of the alleviate your distress. Being as our company scathing review. At first it used to frustrate me
time after an explanation and apology most income comes mostly from the yearly club and honestly at times it still does, but knowing
people aren’t upset and they go on with their dues we can’t afford to compensate for ev- that we did our best, but this wasn’t accept-
vacation. They’re in Aruba and they have ery little thing, because that’s our Members able comes with the job and we’ll keep on do-
a place to stay, that’s all they need. On the money, which has to go back into the running ing it.q

Aruban born and bred Shanella Pantophlet is passionate about tour-
ism. That is the world she studied and works in, so we might as well call
her a specialist. Luckily for Aruba Today Shanella also loves to write.
And together with the fact that the majority of our readers are tourists,
we found ourselves a perfect combination for a column: Hotel Hustle.