I saw an odd tweet the other day from a Hotel chain. Basically welcoming travelers stuck on icy and snowy raods. If the power is on we’re open they said. Something like that.
Which begs the question. What are the Hotel and Motel policies regarding power outages? Would they kick everyone out to the curb? Refuse new guests?
Would be an interesting problem. The front check-in/out desk is entirely computer dependent. They’d be lost trying to check people in or out with paper and pencils. The days of signing a big ledger book when you check in are long gone. Their card readers would be down. Cash registers don’t work without power.
Any stated policies?
One of my coworkers was in a Walgreens and it lost power. Their staff were extremely rude. Insisting everybody get the hell out now!!! My coworker was very offended. Apparently the store staff was all shook up because their security system was down. But still. That’s a heck of a way to treat customers.
Same thing happened to me in the seventies when I was a bagger at a Piggly Wiggly. We just calmly checked everybody out. I had the job of turning this crank on the cash register. Turning the crank allowed it to work without power.
I was a hotel night manager for awhile, so I can share with you what we did. My hotel was a few hundred rooms, and not affiliated with a larger corporate family or franchise. I had to cope with one planned power outage—large hurricane was coming—and a few smaller, brief ones. We did not evacuate immediately on losing power. We did however try to immediately see what was causing the issue. We had a diesel backup generator, which was sufficient to run emergency lighting. I don’t remember if it had enough oomph to run the building HVAC. For an unscheduled power outage, I don’t remember if I had to check anyone in. If I did, I’d get an imprint of their credit card, copy down their ID info, and hash the rest of the paperwork out in the morning. We print out guest lists and room lists every night, in the event of the hotel software taking a crap, which it sometimes did. At least then the key machine would work. So running on paper backups wasn’t that big a deal. I’d just have the guest fill out a guest card, which explained our policies, the rate, the checkout hour, some of our amenities, and most importantly, their signature agreeing to all of it.
Security would have had to let them into their room, as I wouldn’t have been able to make them a key. Again, it’s something we’d have dealt with later. I’d have waited for guests to call me about the power outage. Hopefully, everyone would’ve slept through it. One PITA, is that the fire doors’ would have all closed. That’s a pain to keep people from screwing with them. Occasionally, they would slam together when they were activated, waking up everyone around them. Good times!
The hurricane was different. We were closed to walk-in traffic, but had a few national and local media groups staying with us. Charles Glass is about the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. I had to figure out how I could get them on our roof for some of the footage they wanted to shoot. Many of the hotel staff stayed at the hotel, and just went back to our rooms after our shift.
So, tl;dr: during a power failure, you still try to provide service to the guests on property, and you may or may not check people in or out, depending on the situation. It’s not that big of a deal. Fires, OTOH…(knocks on tree trunks in thanks that I never had to deal with an actual fire, as opposed to a false alarm)
Great story Gray Ghost. There’s nothing quite like thinking on your feet and making the best of a challenging situation. Corporate chains might not be as flexible. I guess it depends on how much autonomy the local on site managers have.
Power outages seem pretty short for commercial property. I’ve been out at home for 8 days after a winter storm. All the local gas stations, and other stores were up and running within the first day. I was quite thankful because I had to go and buy generator gas several times during that outage.
I was on vacation in Kingston, Ontario during the Northeast blackout of 2003, and also not feeling too well. Nobody showed up to kick me out of the room, and I stayed put, worried about not being able to get back in without the automatic doors, locks, etc working. While there was some light I was able to read the books that I’d bought earlier that day, and I had some devices with Audible books with me. I’d forgotten to pack a flashlight, though, and conserved the battery on my LCD devices so that I could use them as nightlights. Turned in early once twilight fell.
I was working at the desk one night when we lost power during a snowstorm. A lot of people got stuck on the road, so we weren’t full but we still had plenty of people around. We handed out flashlights to everyone and a lot of people came down to sit by the fireplace in the lobby. Fortunately it happened after we had already printed the registration papers and made the keys, so we just kept a list of who had checked in to enter into the computer when the power came back on.
I worked at an independent hotel for many years and we had procedures for doing everything manually in case of fire, power outage, or technical difficulties.
[ul]
[li]Front desk clerks printed out a paper summary of all the currently in-house, due to check-out, and due to arrive accounts at least once per shift. [/li]
[li]The registration card you signed on check-in was stored in a bin, in a slot labeled with your room number. If you changed rooms for some reason your card was immediately moved to the corresponding slot.[/li]
[li]The keycard machine had enough of a battery backup for about 30 minutes, so we had a box of virgin keycards with preprinted room number labels. It was someone’s job, in the case of a power outage, to go through the box and make keys for every room in the hotel before the battery died. The locks themselves were all battery powered.[/li]
[li]Carbon slips and ye olde manual imprint machines for credit cards. Introducing these to the younger staff members was always fun.[/li]
[li]Bins of flashlights and batteries free to hand out to guests.[/li]
[li]A couple of propane BBQs. Though lack of power to freezers/refrigerators meant we’d have to shut down food service in under a day.[/li][/ul]
Depending on occupancy we could run for 2-3 days on reduced service. After that senior management would have to make the call on kicking people out.
New staff usually only had to go through one power/computer outage to learn why management/old hands religiously maintained the manual backups that were unneeded 99.9% of the time.
We were in Hawaii when an earthquake struck, knocking out power. We had been scheduled to fly out that day so we checked out of the hotel, a Sheraton, and headed to the airport. Utter confusion - no power there either! We went back to the hotel and they let us check back into our original room and charged us a lower ‘distressed rate’ due to the lack of services. (They did have backup power at the desk and a few other places.)
We were ‘stuck’ in Honolulu for two extra days and I sadly had to miss a horrible meeting in San Francisco.
I don’t think this was a ‘policy’ so much as ad-hoc dealing with a problem.
We have down-time reports that cover everything we’d need in case the computers go down or the power goes out. After the snowstorm I mentioned upthread I print them out religiously at least twice a shift.