The Compensation Clinic has a case from the Four Points by Sheraton in Phuket, Thailand, this week where I stayed at least 60 nights in the last 18 months, but the property has a good amount of operational issues at times.
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It’s always difficult to put evaluate a select service brand such as this as these properties can be hit and miss, with some hotels being decent while others are mediocre. This particular Four Points is probably the best one I’ve stayed at worldwide.
Yet, there were a ton of times when things have driven me absolutely crazy. As so often with hotels in Thailand, as soon as there is no management around to constantly oversee the line staff, things very quickly fall apart.
This time it was once again extremely borderline. The head chef was on leave, and the main restaurant SEARS was left to its own devices. Despite just 1/4 capacity of guests, main dishes took over an hour to come out and with quality issues at that.
The worst, however, was the constant problem with room keys that stopped working. During a four night stay the keys weren’t working on THREE occasions, and the suite is pretty far away from the front desk.
On the last day, it happened again after getting back from the pool. This time I called the hotel’s phone number and told them to bring me a new set of keys – they refused! So I went to the front desk again, fuming! And once again, nobody was on duty at the Elite Check-in desk. After the two staff members took their sweet time handling a huge line of guests, I went into the back office (wearing swim shorts) and gave them a piece of my mind.
Following that, I left the hotel without even going back to their disaster of a front desk. An absolute disgrace! I’ve seriously never seen such a mismanaged reception area before.
Management later contacted me to apologize, and they credited 10,000 Bonvoy Points to my account:
Honestly, I’d have preferred if this property would just get its act together in terms of staffing and training. While they have already improved a lot since opening, the hotspots for constant issues are still the front desk and the restaurants as long as there isn’t any management around to permanently supervise the line staff. A check-in process there takes a minimum of 10 minutes every single time and that’s simply not the normal standard.
Conclusion
This was the first time in more than sixty nights at this hotel that I got issued compensation here but I was really fuming mad this time around. And I have already put up with a lot of their deficiencies for 1.5 years, some of which were quite horrible.
Why is it so hard for hotels to get their infrastructure under control? Then a guest calls for a repeated lock system failure and they refuse to send a bellboy or manager with a new key up? Ridiculous.
