Reply #285: The hotel desk knows where family-friendly restaurants are [View All]

[jmowreader]

Nowadays, though, they probably won't volunteer the information; one must ask, and here's why:

I was night auditor in a hotel for a couple of years, and one night after doing all of my tasks, I was reading the hotel trade magazines we received. One of them told the tale of a property that got sued for discrimination: a woman, her child and the bellman were going up to the family's room at a high-end property when the kid pointed at a button labeled something like "penthouse suites." He asked "what's that" and the bellman told him that the penthouse suites were on the roof, and no one stays in them because they're really expensive. The kid was satisfied with this request, but the mom was furious. She stormed to the general manager and said the bellman implied that they were too poor to stay in the penthouse suites because they were black. (This was one of those places that charges over $400 per night for the inexpensive rooms; if the desk gave you a room key and you're not on staff there, you're not poor.) The GM attempted to make this woman happy: comped her room for the weekend, moved her to the penthouse suites, comped meals, limo service, you name it. Well, she wasn't happy yet...she sued the property for a double-comma settlement I don't remember right now, claiming discrimination, distress, pain and suffering.... The property's franchisor decided to fight it, sent in some high-powered lawyers and finally got the thing thrown out of court because it seems that being told something is really expensive is not the same as being told "you can't afford it because you're a little black boy."

Anyway, this case reverberated throughout the hospitality industry. Before it hit, the desk probably would have told the parents that the hotel has a restaurant but they don't have anything your kids would like, it's expensive as all get out and it's pretty stuffy in there, but we have a complimentary limo service that can take you to all sorts of family-friendly places and even bring you back--and the guests would have been happy as hell. Now? "They discriminated against us; they told us our kids were unruly, we were poor and we weren't welcome in the hotel restaurant, so we want $50 million and the entire staff to be fired"--and they very well might get it, depending on the venue. It's happened to us at the store in different circumstances--a guy bought a $1500 refrigerator, put it in his pickup, wouldn't let us tie it down, didn't tie it down himself, then came back and threatened to sue us for not securing his load if we didn't give him a brand-new refrigerator after the one he bought fell out of the back of the truck. And fucking Corporate decided to eat the old refrigerator because refrigerators are cheaper than lawyers.

I hate Republican lawyers. Money-grubbing fucks.