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<\/a>I\u2019ve had the good fortune to have worked a number of different jobs in my life. They all come with their share of learning curves and you\u2019re just going to have to believe me when I tell you ice cream jockey at the local Baskin-Robbins next to Big Al\u2019s video arcade had the steepest one of all, but the jobs I\u2019ve had that really taught me about customer service were the ones that required me to get out from behind the counter\/desk\/Muppet costume (another story for another day) and experience my job from the vantage point of the customers I was serving. Buy something from your store. Order your own pizza. Ride your own ride (that was at Walt Disney World, so it may be a little job-specific). Try to understand what the people you\u2019re serving are experiencing.<\/p>\n
As we plowed through a driving rainstorm the dimly lit streets of Napier, New Zealand were doing very little to make the night on Hawke\u2019s Bay magical in any way. The travel fates seemed completely indifferent to our level of weariness, hunger and need for a restroom. We were looking for a hotel that should have been right in front of us but wasn\u2019t, despite the insistence of he hotel\u2019s desk clerk, who was only taking the time to guide us in by phone during the spare moments she wasn\u2019t taking to snog her boyfriend\u2026 we could hear<\/i> it on the phone, for the love of all that was good and holy\u2026\u2026 it was very clear this person had never followed or been within six blocks of the advice to be a customer of your own business.<\/p>\n
The hotel was clearly existing in a dimension adjacent but not actually contained within the one in which we were trundling. The address did not correspond with any numbers or signage we could make out in the rain. Every multistory building we looked at did not resemble in any way a hotel. The desk clerk on the phone was on the other side of helpful, explaining in broken English that the neon sign should be right in front of us, but no amount of wishing or willpower was making it so. My shooting partner and I wondered if perhaps we had been entered without our knowledge into a popular but unknown to us New Zealand reality television show, perhaps one called Hide the Hotel.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what had happened.<\/p>\n
We had made reservations at a hotel called the VR Hotel Napier. Suspecting this may be short for something, we had done a Google search on the hotel\u2019s address before leaving the United States, but every listing for the hotel on every site had the identical name. Since I\u2019ve stayed at hotels like The Good Hotel in San Francisco\u2026 places with unique names\u2026 I had to figure this was part of the local vernacular. Turned out the VR was a temporary name\u2026 short for Viceroy. The hotel had been sold a few months prior and was under new management, but the new owners had decided \u201cVR\u201d was a cooler name than \u201cViceroy,\u201d at least until they could come up with something better.<\/p>\n
They had not, however, changed the signage<\/i>, or had even kept it in decent working order. In the rainy Napier night, all we could see was the word \u201croy\u201d sputtering sullenly above us. Worse, the only lighted entrance to the hotel was a narrow set of double doors down an alley. The hotel was presenting its unmarked bare concrete side to the street, giving us no clue that it was a hotel. Of course, there was no parking lot to speak of. Natch. So even though we knew this hotel had more than seventy rooms, we didn\u2019t see any signs of mass quantities of people calling it home for the night.<\/p>\n
There are two ways of thinking about the hotel rooms you book on a trip. The first is utilitarian – the \u201cevery room looks the same in the dark\u201d philosophy. Get some sleep, get moving in the morning and just be grateful most of the outside world is kept at bay for a few hours. The other way of looking at it is the way I look at it. Your hotel, even if only for one night, is your home base. It\u2019s where you recharge your mental batteries for the next day. It doesn\u2019t have to be the Four Seasons, but it should, in my opinion, be a place that doesn\u2019t add more stress than it relieves, so comfort should at least be a factor in your decision. Personally, I feel better if I can wake up to a view like this:<\/p>\n<\/a>