I spend a fair bit of my free time looking at the everything-aggregation site Reddit, often spending a fair amount looking at gifs of dogs. But I’m very pleased to say I’ve recently found a way to tie my Reddit use back to my professional life.
As a professional journalist covering the hotel industry, it’s a pretty regular occurrence that I’ll get pitches or conduct interviews that revolve around some variety of hotelier success stories.
When we write about technology in hotels, often we receive input from folks who handle whatever tech issue particularly well, or public relations folks will reach out to us touting something their client or employer is doing to outpace their competitors in one way or another.
That’s part of why I found my recent discovery of the “Tales from the Front Desk” subreddit so interesting. It is a portion of the site dedicated to real hotel employees anonymously dishing on the awful things that happen on property. (Fair warning before clicking that link: Quite a few posts include some unsavory language, so don’t be surprised if you run across a few four-letter words describing less-than-ideal guests or managers.)
These anecdotes can be as benign as unfriendly guests lying about having dogs to avoid paying a pet cleaning fee to more serious complaints, like employees dealing with the consequences of employers not paying their vendors for months at a time.
Like anything involving people dishing on the negative aspects of the lives and jobs, there is the entertainment value to just getting a peek into the dysfunctional inner workings, but there’s also actual useful information to be gained from reading this.
Much of the site is built around the catharsis of unloading your day-to-day work complaints—and why won’t some guests leave you alone during your lunch break?—but I think there are some real, useful lessons to be learned by looking at the nitty-gritty of the business as opposed to just those immaculately curated success stories.
A recurring theme of the subreddit, as you can probably guess from that last link, is front-desk employees finally reaching their breaking points with particularly irritating guests. I think this is something that could be useful and enlightening for managers to help get a better sense of their employees’ perspectives, which can lead to more empathetic and likely more effective management in moments of high stress.
It’s fair to point out, too, that it’s not all negativity, as evidenced by this recent post celebrating the joy a hotel employee experienced from enriching a guest’s stay while the guest was in town for a family funeral.
So what do you think? Are there lessons to be learned from skimming these nightmare stories, or am I just being a creep? Let me know via email or on Twitter.
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