This was around 2006, and I was at a little company called IBM. Now that I’m no longer with IBM, some of my IBM stories are going to come out. Most of them, actually, are good stories. This one is.
I had a 4 day engagement at a client, fly in Sunday afternoon for a Monday morning meeting, and the departure date was Thursday afternoon. Four nights in a hotel. The place was on the east coast somewhere, I think in Virginia, and it was a new engagement. Looking at the IBM travel website, I had trouble finding a place I thought would be a decent hotel to lodge at, especially since there was no Hilton nearby, my favorite. I settled on a well-known chain near the client.
Honestly, I have put out of my mind the gory details on what the problem really was, but it was quite unpleasant. When I walked into the hallway where my room was, the whole place smelled bad. My room was superficially ok, but if you looked close anywhere it obviously was not being well cleaned, and it smelled also. I really wanted out of the room now. It didn’t look reasonable to try to get them to put me in a different room – my gut was they’re all the same level of ugly. It was too late in the evening to do anything about it. When I checked with the IBM travel website, I also couldn’t make a new room reservation for tomorrow. It would have to be Tuesday. In the end, reluctantly, I stayed two nights in this horrible ugly smelly hotel and I didn’t die, I did not get bed bugs, I didn’t even get sick. Nonetheless, I stayed the final two nights with great relief in a quiet and pleasant Holiday Inn down the street.
Checkout proved problematic. When I went down to the lobby to check out and move to the Holiday Inn, I told the young man behind the desk that I was checking out, and he said fine, asked me my room number, looked up from his computer after a few moments and said I was good. “I need a receipt please.” “Oh,” he said, “sorry, but the printer is down, I can’t give you a receipt.” “Ah,” I said, “but I really do require a receipt. If you really can’t print one, a handwritten one will do.” “Sorry,” he said, “I can’t do that.” Well you know what I said next, “I need to speak with your manager please.” And the guy refused. No manager here right now. “So, to confirm, you are refusing to get me a receipt, and you are refusing to let me speak with a manager.” “Right. Sorry.” So I left, I didn’t think there was much else I could do.
You have guessed what happened next. I got charged for my two nights at the Holiday Inn, and I got charged for my two nights at the Smelly Hotel. I called the Smelly Hotel, and asked to speak with a manager. I told him that I had checked out. “Not according to the records that I have here.” I told him that indeed I had, and that I had been refused a receipt and refused any opportunity to interact with a manager. He didn’t budge. I called American Express. They could see that I had been charged for two hotels during two nights of my trip. I was a little surprised: they did not side with me, they sided with the Smelly Hotel. I really couldn’t blame them too much – the Smelly Hotel provided documentation, and I had none.
What I did next proved to be joyous. I requested reimbursement from IBM for the two additional nights of hotel charges. I had previously requested and received expense reimbursement for my two nights at the Holiday Inn. In seconds, I had a return email, and it was clear that this reply had an automated source. It said, basically, “we have noted that you have charged two hotel rooms for two of the days of your engagement.” The next sentence was telling of IBM’s trust-the-employee culture. It doesn’t always work this way, even at IBM, but it usually does, and it is most gratifying. It did not say “you can’t do that”; the next sentence said “please explain”. So I did. I recounted exactly what happened. I said that I had attempted to rectify the issue with the hotel, and I gave names and phone numbers. I told them I had worked with Amex but they had refused to reverse the charge. My next email on the topic came from IBM 12 hours later. It was approval for reimbursement and an indication that the money was on its way to my checking account. Way . cool.
But something about how things went down caused me to develop an interest in the list of IBM’s officially approved hotels. I knew from having consulted it recently that the Smelly Hotel had indeed been on that official list. As an employee one could, probably still can, look at this database directly. The travel website automation for hotel stay requests would consult this database and only listed hotels absent from that list if you asked for it, and would also indicate that a travel exception would be generated. The default, then, was to only show an IBM employee places to stay that are on the approved list. Naturally.
I consulted the list of IBM approved hotels again. The Smelly Hotel was no longer on the list.
Boom.