Pat McCann, the CEO of Dalata, Ireland’s largest hotel group, learned the hard way not to return lost property without getting a call from the guest in question first.
We’ve all left phone chargers, keys or other items of personal property in hotel rooms in our lifetimes, and there’s a reason why hotels don’t just package them up and put them in the post to you without your permission.
Let’s just say it has nothing to do with money.
Pat McCann, the CEO of the Dalata Hotel Group, is our guest this week on The Architects of Business, JOE’s show in partnership with EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™, and he explained to host Tadhg Enright how doing the right thing by one of his guests backfired spectacularly.
When asked what the strangest item was that he’d seen left behind in a hotel room, he revealed, “Well, I tell a story about when I became general manager of Jury’s Ballsbridge, as it was, we used to have lots of issues with lost property.
“I said, ‘Look, we have to sort this out’ because things were going to lost property and they’d get sent on to the wrong address, or whatever it was.
“So I said, ‘Look, we have the information. So when something is left in a room we parcel it up and we send it to the address of the person who stayed in the room’.
“So that was going absolutely fine until I get a call from a lady one morning to say that she’d received a nightdress from us but she had never stayed in the hotel, and she wondered why we were sending her something like this.”
Listen to the full show here…
“The penny suddenly dropped that the husband was playing away! I had to revise my policy very quickly, there’s a good reason for everything and that was my reason for that!”
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