Take Care Of Your Doggone Dog!

I am the night audit worker at a fancy hotel that does accept pets for a $75 fee. Honestly, if you just tell us you have a dog and it’s too big of an issue to pay the fee, I waive it at check-in.

According to my second shift, calls started rolling in around 9:00 pm about a dog barking on the second floor. No big deal, though, right? Call the owner and have them take care of the issue. Well, the phone number we were provided is out of service. Great, time to call the room. No answer. All right, let’s email them, I guess? No answer.

I arrive at around 11:00 pm, and calls are coming in nonstop from the second floor. People are very mad and this dog is still going. I end up moving three rooms to higher floors with complimentary upgrades to the rooms, and I fully compensate the night for two other rooms.

At around 11:45, my swing shifter who stays until midnight calls animal control because we have no way to contact the guest. As luck would have it, though, come midnight — and coincidentally, as a few of these other guests who are upset are at the desk talking with us — someone comes up to me asking about these odd charges found on their card. The moment they say what room it is, I realize I don’t have to look this up; it’s the dog room.

Me: “The fees are for the dog that you didn’t inform us about. The dog has been barking for multiple hours, and we’ve lost revenue from multiple rooms because of it. I’ve had to compensate multiple rooms for the disturbance.”

They go full defensive.

Guest: “I’ve only been gone for an hour at most! It’s not my fault you compensated all those people!”

You know, all those people who are trying to sleep at midnight but are being kept up by YOUR dog.

Before I could respond, though, my swing shifter — who’d been dealing with this for half his shift — stepped in and berated them over the neglect of their dog and how close they were to having it removed by animal control. He really went off on them, and I applauded how well he did it without all the expletives I knew he was dying to scream at them.

If I had been able to legally make them pay for those rooms I had to comp, I would have done it in a heartbeat. We did get positive reviews from the guests who stayed and were comped or moved; they appreciated everything we did to help resolve the issue.