How often? All the flippin' time, and there's little anyone can do about it. It's one of the crosses to bear in this business (like little old ladies calling the desk in the middle of the night to complain that the guest in the next room is noisy, but when you go up to check, there's not a sound coming from the 'offending' room).
All you can do is try to keep enough carts around (you should have two for the first fifty rooms, plus one more for each additional fifty rooms). But no matter how many you have (and they are surprisingly expensive, by the way -- even a 'cheap' one runs about $600-700 -- which is why a lot of hotels tend to skimp on them, or keep them around after they've obviously been worn out more than ten times over), when they're gone, they're gone.
And yes, guests do become upset when they need a cart and none are available, but we can't make them reappear by magic.
We can check the halls and have a runner retrieve them from a corridor when we have none left in the lobby: many people don't want to be bothered with returning the empty cart to the lobby when they finish with them. Ditto for the parking lot: some people leave them out there.
But there's nothing we can do about a luggage cart wheeled into a room and kept there overnight, unless we catch the offending guest in the act. We can't go door to door and search room to room for carts while the rooms are occupied. That's what makes it a major pet peeve - naturally, when the next guest needs a cart and there are none, she gets upset with us, not the guest who decided to keep the cart all to himself overnight.
We've considered attaching a noisy electronic device to each cart that emits an alarm when the cart is separated for more than forty-five minutes from the spot in the foyer where we keep them parked -- at least making enough of an obnoxious noise to give the offending guest an incentive to push the cart back out in the corridor where we can get to it, and get it out of the room. But I'm not aware of anyone on staff who is similarly gifted like my best friend when I was in college, who liked to design and build electronic devices.
Perhaps someday such a device will be produced commercially at a decent price.
Originally appeared on Quora
All you can do is try to keep enough carts around (you should have two for the first fifty rooms, plus one more for each additional fifty rooms). But no matter how many you have (and they are surprisingly expensive, by the way -- even a 'cheap' one runs about $600-700 -- which is why a lot of hotels tend to skimp on them, or keep them around after they've obviously been worn out more than ten times over), when they're gone, they're gone.
And yes, guests do become upset when they need a cart and none are available, but we can't make them reappear by magic.
We can check the halls and have a runner retrieve them from a corridor when we have none left in the lobby: many people don't want to be bothered with returning the empty cart to the lobby when they finish with them. Ditto for the parking lot: some people leave them out there.
But there's nothing we can do about a luggage cart wheeled into a room and kept there overnight, unless we catch the offending guest in the act. We can't go door to door and search room to room for carts while the rooms are occupied. That's what makes it a major pet peeve - naturally, when the next guest needs a cart and there are none, she gets upset with us, not the guest who decided to keep the cart all to himself overnight.
We've considered attaching a noisy electronic device to each cart that emits an alarm when the cart is separated for more than forty-five minutes from the spot in the foyer where we keep them parked -- at least making enough of an obnoxious noise to give the offending guest an incentive to push the cart back out in the corridor where we can get to it, and get it out of the room. But I'm not aware of anyone on staff who is similarly gifted like my best friend when I was in college, who liked to design and build electronic devices.
Perhaps someday such a device will be produced commercially at a decent price.
Originally appeared on Quora
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