Foreign Perspectives

That’s an obvious question to ask but, of course, most people know roughly what the answer will be for hotels in general ie after lunch to late evening.

In fact, we state that it’s from 3pm to 10pm although there’s usually some flexibility at either end of that time. So, for example, we can normally let people check in from around noon if they let us know in advance. Similarly, whilst we officially close the office at 10pm it generally takes us ’til around 11pm to actually get everything locked up.

However, despite us being clear on the hours, we still get people saying that they’ll be arriving at 1am or 5am now and again. Historically the 1am people have rarely made it on schedule so we routinely reply that their reservation has been cancelled.

The 5am people are always Parisiens who have booked “Saturday” and are planning on spending the entire weekend in the south of France but only paying for one day in a hotel. It takes quite some time to explain to them that actually hotels are booked by the night and if they want in at 5am on Saturday then they’re going to have to book Friday too or the room won’t be available ’til noon at the earliest.

Anyway, I’m sitting now for someone who should have been here some hours ago and will be billing them as a noshow once I finish off this post.