Here’s a happy hospitality tale about an old dog that became lost. It was a toy dog actually. And this tale has a twist.
One day recently I received a call from a guest whom I had met a day or so earlier. She told me she was really in need of my assistance and had only called me as a last resort. Hmmm, I started to worry at that point. She told me she had lost her dog. Her toy dog which she had lovingly kept since childhood. She felt it may have been mistakenly wrapped in the sheets or something when Housekeeping cleaned her room. She was too polite to insinuate it had been stolen. She had tried to locate it the day before by calling housekeeping and by asking the front desk to assist with the search, but to no avail.
51 year old “Ted”
Now I can understand that a 42 year old toy dog would have special meaning for its owner, as I myself have a 51 year old small teddy bear I call, wait for it… “Ted”. I’ve kept Ted since I was a very small boy. It was given to me when I was boarding at an English junior school. Ted and I are inseparable. I was traumatised one day when I came home to discover that my then adolescent dog ‘Lucy’ had found Ted while I was out and had decided to take him for a “play” in the garden. One glass eye was missing, which I later found, but otherwise no serious injury was inflicted.
Back to the story. I asked housekeeping again if they had it. I checked with the front desk again if they had seen it. No was the answer. The guest wouldn’t give up and I decided I wouldn’t either. So I then made a call to the most appropriate manager whom I felt I could trust to handle this one. I contacted the guest and told her I had put out an all persons bulletin, offered a reward on WeChat, and then waited.
A little while later I received a WeChat message from the department manager to say the dog had been found in Housekeeping. There was a photo just to make sure it was the right one, which I immediately forwarded to the guest.
Yes, Success! Happy guest. The dog was then reunited with its grateful owner.
But what had happened?
It turned out that a well meaning housekeeping associate had taken the old dog to be cleaned, something which was discovered and stopped just in the nick of time. I am not sure how a 42 year old stuffed toy dog would have survived the cleaning process. I was concerned though; why didn’t the associate tell anybody? I decided to give her the benefit of doubt. And besides, the tale ended well.
So the moral of the story? Don’t always take no for an answer and more importantly, beware of well meaning people, especially the ones that do not communicate properly…
(Post script: the guest has since posted a lovely review on line…)
