Customer service does matter

Recently we were in a hotel for a mini vacation and the breakfast experience left a lot to be desired. The hotel offers a buffet style breakfast each day of your stay. Of course, breakfast hours are different between weekday and weekend so you have to be aware of that. 

We went down for breakfast about an hour after breakfast started and found it busy but we have seen this same breakfast area busier than today and had a good experience. This time was so different as our first encounter was there was no coffee available and that quite a while for it to be refilled. We then headed to where to where the food was an that was even worse. Of course, there was a couple of ruby teams staying at the hotel so they were all down trying to get some food. Well by the time we could get to possibly have some food it looked like a tornado had gone through as there wasn't much left of anything at all. We were able to grab an egg patty each and I got a few hash browns and my husband got a few baked beans but that was it. There were not pork patties at all so that was a very frustrated situation.

We had a very small breakfast and finally after about 15 minutes they started to refill the eggs, hash browns and pork patties. This was after we figured we would make do with the small amount that we had and grab something later on in the day to make up for the lack of breakfast. We were not the only ones upset with the lack of food available as an option for breakfast. The breads and bagels had been wiped out along with any available fruit so the choices were extremely limited.

We did go and speak with a manager only to be told that what can we expect when everyone comes down at once. Her comment was “They are doing their best because everything needs to be microwaved". The staff should be monitoring the food levels to ensure that things don't run out when it is busy. We hadn't been anyone even checking the levels of the various food items so if that was their best I wouldn't want to see a bad day.

Customer service is very important especially in both hospitality and retail as customers are where the business can either win or lose. I hope that the next couple of days were going to be a better experience otherwise I know that I will be doing a review about my experience.

Edit: we spoke to the manager again the next day after the breakfast experience was much better and she let us know that the General Manager and herself (Operations Manager) went into the kitchen the previous day after we spoke to them and got things moving a bit better. She also recommended that they get an additional microwave. So, this shows that if there is an issue, it's important to make someone aware of it because if you don't say anything they won't know there is an issue.