A Challenging Week

This week has presented some unexpected challenges. First of all, there have been some changes at the Wigwam. This week the management made the tough decision to lay off quite a few employees. This included people from many different departments and it came as a complete shock to everyone. Some of the employees that were laid off had been there for over 20 years! Most of them were salaried managers whose positions have now been completely eliminated for the time being. I know in this tough economy it isn’t out of the ordinary to have lay offs, but I guess somehow I didn’t think it had come to that point at the Wigwam because we have had an extremely busy January. Apparently the rest of the year is not looking as promising.

These layoffs are going to have a huge impact on the front desk. We lost our Front Desk Manager, which leaves us with two supervisors and our Director of Rooms. This is going to put a lot more strain on those three people. Many of the Front Desk and PBX Agents have already expressed their concerns about losing a leader. They are worried that the support that they need won’t be there. Hopefully in my role as the Front Desk Trainer I can provide some of the support that they will be looking for.

We had another challenge present itself mid-week. We have had a group called Case IH staying with us all month long. They sell large farm equipment so we have a few multi-million dollar pieces of farm equipment stationed on our front lawn. This totally changes the look of the resort because it is the first thing you notice when you drive into the property. All month long, however, Case IH has been the only big group on property so this hasn’t been a big deal. Well this week that all changed. We had another group, Insight Communications, that brought 102 people to our resort for their annual meeting. Apparently they were not aware that there was going to be farm equipment on the front lawn and when the group contacts arrived, they flipped out (understandably). Luckily for us, we had a couple of days before the rest of the group arrived so we were able to come up with a solution. We decided to do a “satellite” registration desk. We pre-made all of the packets and keys for the arriving group members and set up a temporary registration desk at a scenic location on property. The buses coming from the airport dropped off the group members to this location. This meant that they did not drive through the front of the property, allowing us to prevent the group members from seeing the farm equipment. Obviously they will see the equipment if they walk around the property, but at least it wasn’t their first impression. And today one of the group contacts told me that she has heard from many of her group members that they felt like VIPs because we created a registration desk just for them. Talk about a complete turn around!