About now, the Renaissance Hotel in Vancouver should have every possible room occupied -at least for the next few weeks. It is the 2010 Olympic, after all. Walking down the hallway to their room, guests are likely to notice that it is an older hotel that has been renovated .
The rooms are quite lovely with a magnificent view. That is during the day time.
However, at night, the Renaissance Hotel has a secret visitor that causes havoc, lost revenue and up until now, a troublesome ghost- like ability to escape detection.
On the night of January 29, 2010, I was a guest at the Renaissance Hotel in Vancouver. Everything was good. The bed was very comfy. While the hotel didn't offer a robe, I let this one slide, I was in Canada and perhaps their four star hotels have different standards there.
Sometime before midnight I turned off the light. It would not be an evening of Internet surfing. The hotel charges a whopping $13.00 for Internet connectivity. I can buy a $10 glass of wine in a hotel, but $13 to get online? I don't think so. A girl has to have some principles.
It happened at 2:30 A.M. What sounded like an airplane crashing in the room caused me to literally jump out of bed. The sound was deafening. As it happens when you are jolted from a delicious rem cycle, it took a few minutes to figure out that (1) this was not a fire alarm (2) A plane was not crashing into the room (3) The sound was coming from the air vent.
If I had been more coherent I would have realized the front desk wasn't surprised when I called. The didn't say, " Get Out of the Room Immediately and we'll have someone check it out." No, they said as if this were a normal occurrence in the middle of the night, "We'll move you to another room."
When the manager arrived, some ten minutes later, the sound disappeared. I needn't worry that he wouldn't believe me, he has been this route before.
With a candor that I both appreciated and was shocked at, the manager explained that ever since they renovated the hotel they have had this problem. He said, "It moves around the hotel from room to room. It doesn't strike every day, and no one can seem to figure out what is causing it."
As soon as the words were out of his mouth I thought, "That will be a nice treat for your Olympic guests."
On the night in question, three rooms were affected. Fortunately for the hotel they had extra rooms to move us for the night. Of course, it took another 2 hours for me to fall back to sleep, but the remainder of the night was quiet as a church mouse.
Upon checkout the desk clerk asked the obligatory, " How was your stay?"
When I responded with the story of the hotel fan-ghost, she gave me a wan smile and said, "Sorry. What she didn't say is that she would adjust my bill.
I smiled back, and in my most gracious voice I suggested that I needed to be compensated for my inconvenience.
She made an offer. I suggested she needed to be more generous.
In the end, I received free parking for 2 nights (a total of $60) plus no charge for renting "A Serious Man," a movie I had already seen but my daughter had not, and given that she fell asleep 30 minutes into the film, I was grateful I didn't have to pay for it.
Which brings me to the Olympics. The hotel has a full-house. Do they have an obligation to tell guests about this pesky problem? The problem doesn't occur nightly. It doesn't occur in the same rooms and according to my chatty nighttime manager, they have checked but have no idea what the problem is. In other words, if they could have fixed the problem, they would have.
Like many businesses with a major problem, the Renaissance Hotel is missing an opportunity to turn the problem into an advantage. Reasonable people can relate to the fan-ghost, particularly if the hotel has been diligently working on the problem.
Wouldn't it be better to let guests know ahead of time that the fan-ghost could be visiting their room? Why not, in the spirit of the Olympics, make it a game. Have a big board in the lobby and track the nightly visits of the fan-ghost. The rules would be if the fan-ghost visited and someone from the front desk could confirm the fan-ghost was making a racket in that room, the guest would receive some free gifts.
It could be an escalating scale. If the fan-ghost visited one night, it would be worth a free bottle of wine. If the fan-ghost made a second visit to the same guest, they would receive a free night's stay. And so on and so on.
Instead of having angry guests, everyone would relax and secretly hope their sleep was interrupted. Just sayin'