I thought that I should take a few minutes and explain to all my readers, how operations work in a boutique hotel in New York City. Typically, in large hotels there are several departments that handle very specific aspects of the guest's experience. Regarding the "front of the house," there will be a department for bellmen and a separate department for doormen. Large hotels have a department for front desk agents and a separate one for concierge. They have a PBX operating station that handles all phone calls and transfers them to the proper departments. At R&B Hotels, these departments are all combined. The front desk splits it's time between checking people in and out, answering phones, as well as booking Broadway show tickets, answering emails, making dinner reservations and arranging for bus and helicopter tours.
There are no bellmen or doormen at our hotel. Every member of the bell team has the title of bellman/doormen and we perform both jobs at the same time. We divide our time between valeting cars, storing luggage, checking guests into the hotel, selling town cars to get our guests to the airport, retrieving luggage and hailing taxis. We are a 210 room hotel and there are only 6 bellmen/doormen on the entire staff which means that there is rarely any more than 2 bellmen/doormen on shift at any given moment. Here's a typical conversation on the radio:
Lenny: "Dylan, can you help me out? I'm outside trying to get a taxi for a guest going to JFK and we have a guest pulling up in the loading zone who needs help unloading their bags and valeting their car. Over."
Dylan: "No can do Lenny, I'm up on the 16th floor waiting for the elevator. I just escorted a guest into their room. I should be down in a couple minutes. Over."
Natasha: "Front desk to bellmen, bellmen come in."
Dylan: "Go for the Bellmen."
Natasha: "We have a guest in the lobby who needs to retrieve their luggage and needs to arrange a town car bring them to La Guardia."
Dylan: "Roger that, please stand-by. Someone will be with that guest in a moment."
Lenny: "Dylan, I just got that taxi to JFK. I'll take care of the family that needs to valet, you handle that town car. Roger?"
Dylan: "Roger that." The elevator just showed up, I'll be there in 30 seconds."
To top it off, we don't have an employee elevator. Guests and employees all use the same elevator which can make the waiting time excruciating. My co-workers and I typically don't take lunch breaks at work either. I eat most my meals at work in the bell closet standing up with my radio on so that if I get a call, I can put down my sandwich and go get that tip!
I've worked an 8 hour morning shift by myself when we had over 100 check outs. For those of you who don't know what that means, it means I was fucking busy! I would have to take a bell cart to a guest's room, bring their luggage downstairs, tag it, store it, get them a taxi and all the while, have a lobby full of guest's waiting to get their bags, store their bags, arrange for a car service or valet their car. 100 rooms means about 350 people leaving the hotel in the first 5 hours of my shift and the last 3 hours is me retrieving all the bags that I spent the morning putting away as well as getting taxis, and arranging for town cars. I still don't know how I made it through that day!
But you know what? We all hustle. All day, every day we are busting our asses so we can leave with as much cash in our pocket and make as many guests happy as we possibly can. Some may call that unnecessarily greedy, but this is New York, "I'm just trying to get mine, I don't have the time, to knock the hustle for real." (Jay-Z)
