Yesterday we had a Signature Training follow up meeting. Now since I’ve only worked at the hotel for a few months I missed out on the first part of the training. This training was held from 2pm to 6pm, which sucked for me because it’s right in the middle of my sleep times. It was another one of these training programs that spells out common sense down to the letter.

As it turns out we also use the Mystery Shopping that Signature offers. This is where people from this company call the hotel and go through the process of booking a reservation with whomever is working to make sure they are following their Magic Formula. Their Magic Formula is 16 steps that the hotel has stripped down to 6 steps that guarantees a 100% Mystery Shopping score. Which to me sort of shows the flaws in this Magic Formula of theirs.

The best part of all of this is that they record these calls that they make checking up on the hotel. The hotel can call a 800 number to listen to the recorded calls to see how they did. You simply enter in your 5 digit hotel id and you can listen to all the calls for your hotel. Or you can alter the 5 digits to listen to other hotels calls. Which in itself should provided hours of entertainment for me when I’m bored.

But it is a good thing. I’m rusty as hell when it comes to my dealing with the guest skills. I had built up a hate for all guests in the years that I worked at the worst hotel ever. So even though it was all common sense, it was needed (in my case) to put me in the right perspective.