Steven R.
1/5
When it comes to hospitality management, you can learn a lot about the quality of a company by watching how their customer-facing employees treat people, as well as how management steps up when something goes wrong.
In the case of Island Hospitality Management, what I've learned is that this is not a company that holds a high regard for the satisfaction of its customers or has its house particularly in order.
This stems from a recent experience with some rate shenanigans at an Island Hospitality property. My father, a senior citizen, felt like the front desk agent had taken advantage of him by not honoring the rate he found on the property's website.
Michael Manners, the property's General Manager and an employee of Island Hospitality Management, seemed to go out of his way to be unavailable to speak with us about the issue. Numerous calls/visits to the front desk yielded excuse after excuse about why he was not available at that moment. He never responded to any of our messages or emails. When we finally tracked him down - literally, hunted him down in the hotel and cornered him - his response was basically, "you should have known better and booked it differently."
While the money was not so important to us, we felt strongly that this was not the way to treat customers and decided to escalate the matter to Island Hospitality's management team. We tried to do this through normal channels by calling the office and politely letting them know we wanted to raise an issue about one of their properties with a member of the management team. While they were willing to take down my name and information, Island Hospitality would not give any information about how, when, or by whom I would be called back, citing company policy against giving out its employees' contact information. They would not even provide the name of the person they were delivering my message to or tell me who was going to be getting back to us.
I pointed out that they freely publish email addresses for their whole executive team on their website, so the idea that they couldn't give me a mid-level manager's name didn't hold any water with me. At that point, they acquiesced and said they would put me through to someone. They finally connected me with a woman named Becky Jarvis who said she could help, so I began to tell her my story. While I talked, I quickly Googled her name and found out that she is actually a Payroll Specialist and definitely not in the property management chain. Does Island Hospitality does not even respect its customers enough to be honest about who they are speaking with?
In any case, any company in hospitality should know that when a customer has had a bad experience, the last thing they want is to get pigeonholed into some arbitrary process that may or may not actually result in any sort of call-back.
I ultimately decided enough was enough and simply let her know I would reach out to the Executive Team myself. But how crazy is it that they would rather have me waste an Executive Vice President's time than simply provide the name of whatever District or Regional Manager would be calling me back? (What that says to me is that no one was really going to call me back and Island Hospitality probably had no interest in dealing with my situation at all, or is lacking in the proper structure to do so.)
My email to the Executive Team was met with a mostly unapologetic $45 refund (we didn't care about the refund, and even if we did, $45 wouldn't have covered the amount we would have asked for) and seemingly no regard for what seemed like the front desk taking advantage or the General Manager refusing to deal with the issue.
If this is Island Hospitality's approach to dealing with the customer-facing aspects of its business, I shudder to think how they handle the rest of their affairs. Needless to say, we will go out of our way not to stay at their properties in the future.
