Making mistakes, being able to accept responsibility for them and learning from them, can help you grow and get better.

I remember when I was working within the butler services in Vienna, I had a family arriving to one of our Imperial suites for their vacation. The Imperial suite was the category right below the Presidential suite, the hotel had seven of them in total, and they differentiated in design and layout, from traditional to modern. Given that the family paid rack rate for the suite, I arranged for VIP amenities including flower arrangements, a majestic fruit basket, open bar and a bottle of Champagne. The suite looked incredible and it took me a couple of hours from start to finish to set everything up to perfection.

The family arrived and everything seemed to be going smoothly, until the mother looked up the hotel’s website on her notebook, showed me a picture of the Imperial suite (the hotel’s website showed the traditional one, and the family was assigned to a more modern one), and asked me if they are staying in the correct room, as it looked different on the picture. I tried to explain to her that both are suites within the same category and that all of our Imperial suites differentiate from each other. She didn’t comment anything further on it, and I took a deep breath believing this to be settled. But it just didn’t feel right to me and I knew that while I didn’t do anything wrong, I could have done better. And from this point on everything went wrong, the guests started complaining about the service in restaurant, the cleanliness of the room, and one ‘glitch’ followed another. The family ended up being completely disappointed with their stay and departed early from the hotel to never return again. Nothing could have turned their experience around anymore.

Even though no one seemed to blame me for what happened, I knew that I could have avoided most of it by being more proactive right from the beginning by reading between the lines and offering them to move to a different room (and arrange the entire room setup for them again).

Many times you’ll have a feeling that something isn’t going the right way and you have the opportunity to do something about it right then. While being proactive and avoiding issues before they occur (instead of just trying to put out the fires later on) often means putting in extra efforts and work, it will be the right thing to do and save you a lot of headache in the long run.

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