A Job - Bellman Westin Employee Review

A very long list. This is only for the location I work at obviously, I sure hope that the other ones aren't this bad. - Food is provided for free, but the food that is in the employee break room is often bland cafeteria style food that is reminiscent of the slop that made me stop eating lunch at school. - The hotel's restaurant provides a discount, but it is so overpriced that even with the discount you're still paying 16 dollars for a cheeseburger and fries. - There is no designated employee parking. This wouldn't normally be an issue if the hotel wasn't also attached to a shopping mall. There are multiple garages and there's a specific one they tell you to park inside because it has direct access to the hotel, but nothing is stopping regular shoppers from taking your spot and making you park very far away from the hotel. - The building is old and honestly unclean. It's going through renovations now, but those renovations are going to take years and some of the infrastructure inside the building leaves a lot to be desired. At one point in time, all of the guest elevators were malfunctioning, and it took them about 3-4 weeks to get them fixed. One day one of the employee elevators trapped me inside twice in a row. Guests getting stuck inside the guest elevators is also relatively common. Escalators are seemingly constantly broken. The building has multiple bug infestations including crickets and spiders, and I've seen roaches in the basement before. The employee restrooms are usually clean but the public ones are almost never up to snuff. - The dress code. Bellmen are required to wear three layers of clothing at all times, even in the Texas heat. The dress code is so strict as well; you can only wear a white or blue dress shirt with either a vest or light sweater over it, and black or (oddly enough) olive green dress pants. In the winter, I was told I was not allowed to wear a dressy jacket I own, because it deviated from the dress code. We essentially had to protest in order for them to allow us to wear these light sweaters they eventually ordered us, and eventually they did acquiesce and allow us to wear jackets, but imagine having to beg upper management for the ability to be WARM. My manager has complained about pants I was wearing because they have checkered lines, even though they were the right color. They really want you to wear the clothes they provide you, but not only did they never ask me my size, I'm fairly certain they didn't even order the uniform they provided me. They just grabbed random spare clothes they had in the basement to expedite me getting a uniform. This was because I was wearing a dark navy dress shirt during my first week, and I was told by my manager that upper management said I looked "gothic" because of it and that's why they wanted to speed up the process. I was told to dress "business casual" until they provided me a uniform, and they did not specify which colors I was and was not allowed to wear. - Scheduling. This is gonna be a long one, because the location I work at is severely understaffed. They're STILL pretty much in covid skeleton crew mode, even though they probably shouldn't be. According to my coworkers, they used to have a service express team and bellmen were separate. Now bellmen do about 4 different things, and there's only 2 hired for AM shift and 2 hired for PM shift. This makes asking for shift coverage borderline impossible at times. You can be made to work long work weeks that can be anywhere from 7-9 days straight. Some weeks will be slow because of how the industry is and you will only get 3-4 work days out of a week. They are super afraid of using up their payroll, and will schedule you alone for days where its super busy. If they schedule you with the other PM bellman and it's slow, they'll send one of you home to save money. Requesting time off is done with a paper print out the manager made, and telling them specifically which date(s) you need off through either text or vocally will be ignored. PM bellmen work until 11 and are expected to stay after until all their duties are completed. If the workload was too much and you're playing catch up, I hope you weren't expecting to go home at the time you were supposed to. This happens quite frequently for a different reason as well not pertaining to scheduling. Days off are inconsistent, and are sometimes staggered throughout the week instead of right after the other. The front desk management tries their best to schedule you, it's not really their fault. Upper management is where the problem lies, as they won't allow the front desk to hire more bellmen to make it easier for them to schedule. - Responsibilities. The amount of responsibilities the bellmen have does not work well with the lack of staff. On busy days when I was alone, I was told to ask the security staff to help me deliver things to rooms and whatnot. Bellmen have the responsibility of bringing up people's luggage, which is obvious. But at my location, they also have to bring up room service and other various items guests will ask for that would usually go to housekeeping. The 'other items' will now be referred to as GXP cases. GXP cases are timed quite similarly to how restaurants will time the chefs' cook time. If the GXP case takes longer than 15 minutes to complete it makes you 'look bad' and can lead to you getting a write-up. It doesn't matter if you're scheduled alone. You are expected to be taking up towels and other items pertaining to these GXP Cases while also bringing up room service orders. My manager even recommended stuffing my pockets with the common small things guests ask for in GXP Cases so that I can make 'pit stops' along the way to deliver those items quicker while I'm completely overwhelmed with the amount of room service orders that would otherwise preoccupy me. They expect all of this from you so that they don't have to hire more staff, even though that would probably benefit everyone equally. - Room service used to be manageable, because it was done by calling down to the front desk and having them make the order for you. Then they changed it to a QR code that they place inside of every guest's room, which increased not only the amount of room service orders but the volume as well. Theoretically if the front desk had known you were already busy with room service they'd be able to delay sending any new ones and tell the guests that the orders would take longer due to the influx of orders. Now, every guest is told their order will take around 40 minutes on the website they access with the QR code, and they send to the kitchen as soon as the guest sends the order in with their mobile device. Since this is a business hotel, people ordering food after their meetings is very common. This essentially means that if food is not already provided to a group via the Banquet staff, your day can turn from manageable to hectic in the span of several minutes. The cutoff time for mobile orders is 11 PM, but that doesn't stop people from being able to order food at 10:59:55 (which has actually happened to me before). If an order comes in last minute you have to stay late to deliver it. If multiple orders come in last minute, which is quite frequent, you will be leaving anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes later than you were scheduled to.