What You Need To Know About Working for a Hotel During a Pandemic
I work for a hotel…a hotel that’s half a mile to Disneyland and within a 5-minute walk to the Convention Center. Just imagine the number of people walking through the lobby on any given day, and more so during a big convention.
Summertime? Halloween? Christmas? Uggh!
When Disneyland was overflowing with people, the hotels in the area would be prospering. Lines of people waiting to check-into their hotel rooms, stressed housekeepers bustling about cleaning their assigned rooms, front desk staff with their smiles pasted on their faces helping guests, and salespeople being asked for more revenue, more groups, more PRODUCTION.
That was before Covid-19.
Disneyland has been closed since March….all conventions for the year canceled…no groups are coming….
With over sixty employees, part-time and full-time, only about a dozen of us are still working. The others have either been furloughed or laid off. I’m one of the few who still has a steady income, so I should consider myself lucky, right?
I’m one of the few working regularly. I’m supposed to be a Sales Manager, but I sit in this empty, desolate lobby doing a front desk shift. It’s lonely and quite honestly, a little bit scary and sad.
What once used to be a bustling, cheerful lobby teeming with people either coming or going to Disney, or people attending a convention, has become an eerily quiet area. The streets usually filled with cars and people walking are devoid of any signs of activity — except for the homeless camped out by the bus stops and vagrants on their skateboards, who seem to be increasingly coming out of the woodworks.
There are times I’d have to turn people away, sometimes reluctantly, from using the hotel’s public restroom. Why? I was instructed to do so, partly because of a lack of manpower to constantly clean the restrooms, and partly because of our fear of getting the virus from a stranger. Quite honestly, it goes against my natural inclination to be a helpful customer service-oriented hotelier.
The General Manager, aside from having to do an early morning front desk shift and accounting work, also helps out clean rooms. Yes, there are still rooms to be cleaned even if there are barely any rooms occupied. The Executive Housekeeper who never had to clean rooms, just inspect them, now has to clean them as well.
In the beginning, when the whole state was shut down, the only guests we would get, since the company stubbornly refused to close down, aside from the occasional essential worker, were people who normally wouldn’t be renting a room here because our rates would be too high — gangster looking types or ladies out for some action.
Was it worth it? With the hotel selling at ridiculously low rates, it became commonplace to throw out towels and heavily soiled linens just so the hotel could grab a piece of the business. The hotel might make $80 on a room for a night, but do you really earn anything if you have to throw out the linen because the room was trashed the previous night? Needles, sex toys, trash strewn all over the floor were the norm.
When Disney announced they were reopening, the whole area rejoiced! Hotels that had closed down started plans on reopening, we planned on opening the hotel’s onsite restaurant, and to bring back other employees.
Only to have all those plans dashed when Disney postponed the opening, opting instead for Downtown Disney to just reopen.
With Downtown Disney now open, there’s still just 12 of us still working. Yes, I still have to do both the front desk and sales. Yes, my General Manager still has to do housekeeping, front desk, accounting, aside from answering to our corporate management. Nothing has changed, except that people are a bit more desperate.
With just a few cars in our parking lot, and lately, the absence of police presence in the area, car break-ins have increased. One morning, as a hotel employee was by herself at 6:30 am at the front desk, a man just broke into the hotel’s vending machines, located just about 30 feet away from her.
A couple of days later, noticing an inordinate amount of foot traffic to a room on a higher floor, it was ascertained that the guest was actually a drug trafficker, as confirmed by the sheriff’s office.
On Sundays, I start getting anxiety attacks about going back to work. My blood sugar levels have risen to diabetic levels, I’ve developed asthma, and my arms and neck constantly itch at night. I worry about going to work the next day.
Don’t get me wrong though. We do have guests who are actual vacationers. The ones who come because they just want to go to Downtown Disney and pretend everything is normal. The ones who bring their dogs and want to go to the beach, and visit family they have here. Those are the ones I go to work for. The ones I enjoy chatting with and making sure that they enjoy the limited resources that the hotel can provide at the moment.
That’s how it feels like to work for a hotel that depends on Disneyland and conventions for its business. That’s the impact of Covid-19, and while we remain optimistic for 2021, fear and anxiety can’t be allowed to rule over our lives. Other hotels that cater to the beach crowds or those located near hospitals are doing better, and that’s great. It’s good for our economy. In the meantime though, while we wait for Disneyland and for the conventions to start up once again, we’ll be here to serve the needs of our guests.
