Trumblog

I’ve written before about the danger of becoming a helicopter brand. The way to avoid this of course is to constantly deliver on your brand promise and then over deliver when you don’t.

Case in point:
This week I’m in Atlanta chaperoning my daughter and one of her friends at the Us Fencing Summer Nationals. They are performing well, but I cannot say as much for the hotel where we are staying.

Before my trip I was told that the hotel had been overbooked for the first night and that they were moving us to a different hotel for that night at no cost, plus an additional free night at the correct hotel as well as covering the necessary taxi rides and free breakfast for all. Yes, an inconvenience, but they made good. They wanted to put us in a hotel at the airport, but we negotiated for a room in town.

Unfortunately when we arrived at the hotel that we agreed upon we were told that they had no rooms and that we were supposed to be at the airport hotel. When we got there our rooms we were told that our rooms had been canceled. Some negotiations and phone calls and we weren’t sleeping on the streets of Atlanta.

Once we got to our hotel the next day we found out that the refrigerator that we requested was not available and that the rollaway bed that we reserved would not fit in the room, which resulted in needing a second room though they knocked one night off our stay in that second room. They then delivered breakfast vouchers that they promised only they left 1 out meaning another trip to the lobby to ask for what we were promised.

Checking out of that room and into another one I happened to leave stuff behind, which turned up in their lost and found and retrieving it was perhaps the most pleasant experience I’ve had resolving a situation with my stay.

Now here is what could have happened: I could have been inconvenienced on the first night of my stay, but raved about how well they took care of me. I could be writing about how the Omni does a great job of not nickeling and dimming it’s guests for wifi and just asking for some contact information, rather than complaining that their IT support staff couldn’t get my laptop online. I could be telling the story of a hotel that found the stuff that I stupidly left in my room. I could be raving about how clean the hotel is or how close it is to the venue, but instead I’ll pass on that the smell of the cleanser was over powering and that bad layout of the elevators and floor levels confused everyone. I could have had a great experience with the Omni hotel, but they did everything that they could to avoid that.

So, a few lessons from this fiasco.

1. Keep your promises.
2. Screwing up is ok as long as you make good.
3. Make sure that you do not screw up a second time when making good.
4. If you screw up a second time you need to doubly make good.
5. Do not make people ask for you to deliver on a promise to make good on a previous screw up.
6. There are many opportunities to make people happy, don’t blind your customers to those moments because you dropped the ball too many times before.

Update:
This blog post and a tweet about my wifi connection issues got a response from the Omni, first via Twitter and then a call offering additional IT support. By that time I’d worked around things with my BlackBerry and iPad and preferred to watch my daughter compete than be on the phone with the hotel IT department. Then when I returned to my hotel room at 11PM on the last night of my stay there was a table laden with snacks and drinks as well as an apology note. I appreciate the thought from Omni, though we ended up rolling the table to a friend’s room since there was no possible way that we could consume all of the drinks and snacks ourselves nor in the 7 hours we had left in the room. The sentiment was right, but the delivery a little off.

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