_{Sofitel the Grand in Amsterdam, Image Source: qantas.com}

For an essential part of my life I've worked in hotels. I absolutely loved this part of my life. You always meet new/different people, characters and the more people visited the hotel, the more often things happened. If you love observing people or want to be in the thick of it, visit a hotel between 18:00PM and 23:00PM, sit in the lobby or at the bar and just take in what's going on around you, the best days (and this hugely depends on where the hotel is situated) are off course Fridays and Saturdays.

Recently I have started to reflect on my period working in hotels and I want to share these experiences with you guys in the hope that I also get to hear your stories and experiences. I am going to name this series the Grand Hotel (London). The first part of the title is after a hotel that I've always wanted to work and/or stay in, in the town that I grew up in. I've added (London) to differentiate that it's a fictitious hotel, with a slight reference to the movie 'the Grand Budapest Hotel' and to highlight the city where most of my stories will be based and where I had my longest hotels experience.

the Grand Hotel (London)

The Grand Hotel (London) is a combination of 6 hotels, ranging from 2 to 4 stars, that I've worked in from London to Rotterdam and in the positions starting as a F&B (Food & Beverages) Floor Service Supervisor and finishing as a GM (General Manager) of 2 hotels over the space of just under 10 years in this industry.

_{Inspiration for these posts Hotel Babylon from the BBC. Image Source: hulu.com}

How did I end up in Hotels

A little background information. It has always been my dream to become a pilot, but I also knew pretty early on in life that I would not be able to realise this dream due to being colorblind and having a lazy-eye. With that in mind it also became more difficult for me to decide what I did want to do with my life.

I struggled through primary and secondary school without any real knowledge of what direction to take. Hotels had always fascinated me and one of the best Hotelschool in the world happens to be in the Netherlands.

Having already started working in restaurants to earn some pocket money, I figured this would be a nice and natural step-up to the next level and besides a boss of mine, who I greatly respect, also had a hotel and F&B Managers' background, so I reset my goals and ambitions and wanted to become a F&B Manager ... that was my big dream by the age of 18.

Not much later I enrolled in Hotelschool Den Haag in their newly opened school in Amsterdam.

I did really well, especially compared to how I got through my ground education. The only subjects I failed were statistics and written German ... funny enough, those are now the subjects I need most in everyday life. Due to the fact that I had good grades I was allowed a first choice in where I wanted to go on my placement, the world was at my feet, but of all places I decided to go to London as I had a girlfriend in London at the time. Mind you, I could've gone to the carribean, the USA, Seychelles, Maldives, anywhere in the world and anywhere I still haven't been to date, but I decided for the convenience of London.

_{the First hotel I worked in. Image Source: buildington.co.uk}

I chose for London for several convenient reasons. First of all, it is close bye and by then I was pretty familiar with the city, so it was a 'safe' choice. Second, I had a girlfriend living in North-London, so I would be closer to her and I felt a certain guilt as she had come to try and live in Amsterdam, but went back after trying for 2 months to find a job without any success and third, the hotel would give me a roof over my head so I didn't have to look for a place to stay. Furthermore, as I would have to pay for flights to and from the destination myself, it was a cheaper option.

My first job, that started as my placement, was in a 4 star hotel opposite Kensington Gardens as an F&B Floor Service Supervisor. I was in London, the most leading city in the world when it came to hotel innovations. I had a room for myself on the 9^th floor of the hotel overlooking London, I had a girlfriend in the same city and it was about to get summer ... life was good!!!

My first cold shower

It was the summer of 2003, I remember it vividly as until then it was one of the hottest summers on record and the first movie of the Pirates of the Carribean series had come out and I had seen it in the cinema and Arsenal became league champions unbeaten and for the last time.

The worst memory of this summer was definitely the work itself. The hotel itself was old, it was a typical English central London Hotel with classical furbishings, old fashioned interior and in a run down building on top of a petrol station. In Gordon Ramsay's words whom I met that summer during a book-signing event "a shithole", as it is part of a known brand. As a young and unexperienced student on a placement, what did I know at the time.

During this summer, one day it got so hot that there was a blackout in the area where the hotel was situated, whilst I was on shift. As I mentioned before, it had 9 floors and on this day nothing functioned, so we had to deliver the same levels of service under difficult circumstances. The blackout started about an hour into my shift, which started at 15:00PM, so just before dinner time.

For those of you who are used to having electricity all the time, you have no idea what doesn't function if it goes off. The first thing is off-course no lights as that's the most obvious thing, however there is much more that relies on electricity:

• Computers don't work
• Elevators, people have to walk the stairs
• Airconditioning, things can get extremely uncomfortable, extremely quickly without airco
• Electric cooking
• Fridges and freezers, extremely dangerous as it can speed food spoilage up

Just to mention a few effects when you find yourself without electricity all of a sudden. When you think this is tough on you, just consider how bad this is for hotels and employees working to provide your every needs in a full-service hotel. These people will continue to behave cordially and professionally no-matter the circumstances.

_{Image Source: gq.co.uk}

The (non-)visible effects in a hotel are for example that check-in has to be done the old fashioned way and restaurant bills have to be manually written and added to the bills later. Luggage has to be carried up the stairs, in a normal hotel the guests might do that themselves, however in a full-service hotel the staff will have to do this.

When the airconditioning fails, people will start looking for other ways to keep cool. So people will start looking/asking for fans and in our case I was on room-service-shift, so I had to run up and down with buckets of ice as our hotel didn't have ice machines on every floor ... remember the hotel had 9 floors!!! By the end of my shift I had ran my arse off and made less than 10 pounds in tips ... this is an experience I'll never forget and I will always tip someone if I get a good service, you never know what the person had to go through to ensure you receive that service!

To be continued

This is my first post in a series I want to start about my hotel-experiences and this one is just to warm you up (or cool you down 😉), I have plenty to share with you, but why spoil the surprise, so stay tuned.

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