The Complaint That Arrives Three Days Late
A guest who stayed Friday through Sunday emails on Wednesday: the air conditioning in room 412 never cooled below 78°F, she called the front desk twice, and nobody came. She wants a full refund of $486 and says she will post a review. You pull the records. The work order system shows a maintenance ticket for 412 opened Saturday at 9:14 p.m. and closed Sunday at 10:02 a.m. - 'filter replaced.' The front desk log shows one call, Saturday 8:40 p.m., annotated 'guest says room warm, told her we'd send someone.' No one followed up. The agent on duty Saturday evening was a part-timer with three weeks' tenure. The room was resold Sunday night and the next guest did not complain. Your GM's standing guidance is to refund no more than one night without approval, and to never refund a stay in full without GM sign-off. The GM is reachable by phone.
1. What do you offer this guest, and how do you justify it against the GM's guidance?
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The guest's account is substantially corroborated by your own records, so the question is not whether to compensate but how much and on what basis.
What the records show: the guest reported the problem Saturday evening; the desk logged it; a ticket was opened 34 minutes later; the fix was not completed until Sunday mid-morning. That means roughly a full night and part of a second day in a room that did not meet the standard she paid for. The absence of a complaint from the next guest is weak evidence - a different guest, a different night, and possibly a different problem.
Offer: refund the Saturday night plus a meaningful gesture for the service failure (a future-stay credit or a restaurant/points equivalent), and apologize specifically for the two unanswered calls. Do not lead with the refund policy; lead with the acknowledgment.
Justification against guidance: a one-night refund is within your authority, and the evidence supports exactly one compromised night - Saturday. The second night is not clearly supported because the ticket was closed Sunday morning. So the one-night refund is both permitted and proportionate.
Full refund: do not grant it yourself. Call the GM, present the timeline, and recommend. If the GM approves, fine - but the decision is documented as the GM's.
2. Separately from the guest, what does this incident tell you about supervision, and what do you change?
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Three failures, only one of which is the guest's problem.
- The agent did not escalate. A three-week agent took a habitability complaint and wrote 'we'll send someone' with no follow-up. That is a training and scripting gap, not a character flaw. Fix: a written escalation rule - any guest report of no AC, no heat, no hot water, or a water leak goes to the manager on duty immediately, and the desk logs a callback time, not just a promise.
- The ticket was opened but not owned. A ticket opened at 9:14 p.m. and closed 13 hours later suggests nobody was responsible overnight. Fix: an overnight owner, and a rule that an open habitability ticket is re-checked before the next shift ends.
- No recovery happened at the time. The guest called twice and got nothing. Fix: authorize the desk to offer a room move or a same-night adjustment on the spot, within a stated dollar limit, without calling you first.
Also: the room was resold Sunday without verifying the fix. Add a step - a room with a closed habitability ticket is inspected before it is sold again.
On the review: respond publicly, briefly, without arguing the facts, and invite offline contact. Do not mention the refund amount. Then close the loop internally so the same failure does not produce a second review.