Unfiltered Story #256514

(I work at a hotel and it’s the start of the busy season. The hotel is run by a couple, the husband is the owner, while the wife is the front desk manager. The manager knows how to run the whole hotel on her own and knows that all of the front desk clerks, myself included, know how to do our jobs. The newest of the 3 of us clerks still has multiple years under her belt from a non-chain hotel and has been with us for a year and a half. The owner hasn’t really been into the picture the whole time I’ve been working here but he’s suddenly decided to get more involved but not all of his ideas are great, or legal.)

Owner: Hey OP, I wanted to let you know that from now on whenever you and Male-Coworker do night shift. I want you to take all the guest’s emails and send them an email about our hotel. I want you to promote our rooms and cover what kind of rooms we have here and why they should return to our hotel. I really want to try and get more people to stay with us.

Me: You’re kidding right? Isn’t that illegal?

Owner: Why would it be illegal? I get emails like that all the time! It’ll be fine, just do it from now on. Don’t worry about it during the evening shift, only your night shifts.

Me: No, I’m pretty certain it’s illegal. Anything I get is all don’t from electronic spam robots but that’s why they have an “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of all emails. I never get an email from anyone that either doesn’t have something set up like that unless I actually asked for the information to be sent to me. We can’t just blindly start emailing people and harassing them about our hotel when most likely they are just guests passing by or going to Six Flags.

Owner: You don’t know what you are talking about, jut do what I tell you to do. Why do you have to question me? I’m your boss, you should be doing what I ask of you guys.

(I try a different approach)

Me: I’m pretty certain this isn’t something Corporate would be ok with us doing.

Owner: Nonsense! Why would they? This will get more guests to stay with our hotel and bring more money here, and to Corporate. Why would Corporate not want more money? Just start doing it.

Me: I don’t feel comfortable with this. If you can show me in writing where Corporate says this is ok then I can try, but I’m certain this is illegal. I might not have a degree in marketing but I don’t think our guests would respond well to our unsolicited emails from a hotel they stayed at once during their travels. In fact, I’m pretty sure it will either scare people away, or make people leave bad reviews for our hotel, they might even call and complain to Corporate which might end up with discounts or refunds going to them for their troubles which would hurt our hotel more then help it.

Owner: Let me explain it to you. If we email the quests, it will remind them of their stay with us and remember how well they were treated here and how good the rooms were. Then they will come and stay with us again! I want you to start doing this tomorrow since you are on night shift again. Don’t look at current quests that are here, look at the ones that were here about a week ago and email ALL of them and try to sell more of our rooms to them again.

Me: I’m telling you, this isn’t going to work. You can possibly think Coworker and I can simply email everyone that has stayed here in the past and beg them to stay at the hotel again. You are going to scare off or piss of a lot of people because they didn’t ask for these emails and since Coworker and I aren’t robots, we’ll have a hard time being able to avoid people that tell us to stop emailing them. We aren’t robots, there is only 2 of us, and we don’t have a set up in order to avoid guests that ask for the emails to go away. Why don’t you try putting an AD in the paper to give a small discounts to locals for a night away from their homes, or buy a billboard along the highway we are next to so people see that our hotel is nearby so they will stop and ask for our prices?

Owner: Why would I do that? That would cost us money and if I have you and Coworker do it, it costs me nothing extra! Then we will have more guests coming to stay with us because they are reminded of how good our hotel was when they stayed here.

Me: There is no way either of us can do all this work on top of our usual work load, and good luck convincing Coworker to do this for no extra pay. This isn’t in our job description to be harassing guests to revisit us, and again, I’m very certain this is illegal. I’m not doing any of this email stuff til I see a note from Corporate saying we are allowed to, and I’ll be looking up the laws against this kind of stuff when I get home too.

Owner: You don’t understand how many more people we will get if you start doing this for us. You need to do this during your next shift. Go home and send me a pretend email with what you are going to send to guests. Make sure it has all of our information in it and info about the rooms as well as the hotel phone number. I want everything in it. I’ll let you know if I want any changes to be done to it before you start sending it to our guests. Even if it means we have to send our guests emails 5, 10, or 50 times before they decide to rent from us, it will bring us more money!

Me: 50? You really want me to send an email to a guest 50 times just to sell a room to them? Is this a joke? You’ll scare all of our guests away and probably lose our regulars too!

Owner: Just do it ok?

(The conversation ended there since a guest came up to check-out and I had already clocked-out over 20mins ago due to this argument. I did end up looking online and like I had told my boss, unless someone asks for us to send them our information about rooms and pricing, we are not legally allowed to send out emails unless it’s automated and has an unsubscribe button. I found out later that he had also asked my the Female Coworker to do something similar but instead of emails, to actually CALL ALL of our pasts guests requesting that they stay with us again and practically bully our regulars into giving us their boss’s numbers and emails so that we can ask them to consider hiring more workers so that the new workers can also stay at our hotel, or to convince their boss to let each worker have their own individual room instead of getting our 2 beds and sharing. Luckily she was smart enough to question this request and also refused til she knew Corporate was ok with it all. The wife was shocked her husband had asked us to do something like this and called Corporate to ask if their was ok, they gave them a big fat NO and explained all the legal reasons why and how it would ruin the hotel’s image. None of us have had another crazy request like this again.)