I headed back to the US this morning to speak at a Sysco Food Show in Louisville tomorrow. The early morning brought driving
rain and wind which fortunately had let up by the time my cab arrived to take me down the hill to catch the train fo the
airport in Manchester.Alas, I had to leave my child bride alone in Wales for a couple of days. The weather was apparently user-unfriendly all day. so she relaxed, read, and had a vacation from her vacation. Days like this are when renting houses has it all over time in a hotel.
The food show I'm speaking at is being held in a casino across the river in Indiana. Last night I was reminded of a simple practice you would do well to make your greeters aware of.
After flying all day, all I wanted was a glass of wine, a small steak, and a soft bed in that order. When I approached the desk at the casino steakhouse, the lone greeter was on the phone. I waited, but she kept her eyes down and pressed on with her conversation. After a three or four minutes of being ignored, I wandered into the dining room and asked one of the servers if I could get dinner. She took me back to the desk, got the server off the phone, and returned to her work.
The greeter was pleasant, but clueless that there might have been an issue. She kept me at the desk for a few more minutes, asked me a number of questions, apparently to meet some paperwork requirements on her end, and finally seated me. What would it have taken for this encounter to have been a positive rather than a mood-killer? All the greeter would have needed to do was to make eye contact to let me know that she knew I was there, smile to let me know she was happy about my arrival, and excuse herself from the phone call as quickly as possible.
If I'd had to wait longer than usual or she sensed I was at all annoyed, she could have seated me immediately and handled her paperwork afterward ... but my guess is that nobody ever trained her to be aware of the human dynamics of her job. (Plan B would have been for the server to see what was happening, have the authority to seat me herself and sort it out with the greeter after the fact.)
In a place of hospitality, the entire organization exists to care for the needs of the guest, a concept that unfortunately was not evident tonight. What's happening at your front door?
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