Thursday, October 12, 2017

About my Accor/Ibis complaint and their customer "care"


I'm officially not engaging with the Accor/Ibis customer "care" service anymore regarding my complaint.

The incident itself was detailed here. I sent a formal complaint letter to them and also used their website to file a formal complaint. You can find the letter I sent them at the end of this post.

Their website says they will give a response within 48 hours. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. After 3 weeks I was ranting on Twitter again. It seems their Twitter team is the only one doing anything. But all they did was to ask me to email to a certain address, which responded with a file number and said they were "currently carrying on the necessary investigation and will be back in touch with you as quickly as possible to inform you of the results of our investigation." Another 5 weeks passed and, you know what, nothing.

I don't know what "investigation" would have taken this much time. What can they investigate anyway? First you find out who that was - check your rota or CCTV, assuming you keep those things that long. If you cannot identify her then there is really nothing to investigate. And if you find out who she was, most likely she would have no recollection of the events anyway. So I wasn't really expecting anything more than a generic apology letter that most likely will contain no admission of wrongdoing. Is it too much to ask for? I'm not asking for her to be sacked or anything, although a written record on her file would be appropriate, I'd think.

Of course, this delaying tactic is hardly surprising. Wait long enough, and most people will have their anger died down, or even completely forgot the matter, so no action will ever be required. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people. 
You see, I do take this rather seriously. I spent some time crafting the letter, and even went to the trouble of looking up the manager of the hotel on LinkedIn to be sure I was addressing the correct person. The anger is gone now, yes, but from now on I will just calmly do my best to make you pay, however little or ineffective it might be, for your (in)action.





Mr. Damien Raphanel
Ibis Styles Paris CDG Airport Roissy Hotel
1 Rue de la Haye
93290 Tremblay-en-France
Paris-Charles De Gaulle
FRANCE

Dear Mr. Raphanel,

I write to express my dissatisfaction about the attitude of one of your member of staff during my recent stay at your hotel.

I was booked into this hotel by Air France for an overnight stay on 19th July 2017 after missing a connecting flight. Due to the length of my delay, Air France told me that I would be entitled to a free lunch at the hotel. This was handwritten onto the hotel voucher by an Air France staff member. When I checked in, it was very late at night, and the staff at reception collected the voucher and when I asked him about the lunch, he said I have to ask reception the next morning.

The next morning when I checked out and asked about this, I received what I consider to be a very rude response from one of your staff member (a different one from the previous night). She simply said “no” and gave no further response. I demanded to see the voucher that was collected the previous night, she again said “no”. No explanation was given. Upon my further questioning, she eventually said a bit more along the lines of “you should have gotten a voucher last night, if you do not have one we will not give you lunch”. At no point did she try to help, offer any alternatives, or find out what happened. As soon as she finished the word "no" she went back to her own business – not that she was busy with anything – even though I was still standing there.

While the issue of lunch may have been a mix-up and it could be Air France’s fault, my main issue was the attitude of this particular employee of yours. She was extremely unhelpful. Her attitude was basically “I have seen this trick (to get a free meal) many times, it won’t work on me”. In my opinion this sort of behaviour is completely unacceptable. I did not note down her name, by she stationed the reception at about 11:30am – 12:00 noon on 20th July 2017. (There was another male member of staff, but he was not involved.)

I would like to think that what I experienced should not have come from a global hotel chain like yours. If this is indeed not the level of service that your hotel aims to offer, I trust that, as manager of the hotel, you would investigate the matter and take any necessary actions.

I look forward to hear from you about the matter.

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