Fully booked

‘Alpenresidenz. Karntnerturm. My. Name. Is. Sandra. How. May. I. Help. You?’

I hesitate for a second before replying. I’m not sure whether this torrent of words has come to its end yet or not. ‘Joe Friedmann here. Good afternoon! I’d like to book a double room…’. Before I can continue, the voice butts in on the other end of the line: ‘One moment, please. I’ll connect you.’

‘ReservationsDeskMyNameIsPetra…’.

‘Julio Kinderman speaking. Good afternoon! I’d like to book a double room.’

‘When?’ Petra asks curtly. ‘From 14 to 17 January.’

After a short interlude in which I am entertained with traditional Austrian folk music, Petra returns with the encouraging words: ‘Sorry, we’re fully booked.’

My quest to find a double room for a weekend skiing break in Austria seems doomed to failure. Petra is the fifth hotel employee in Austria to have dashed my hopes of finding hotel accommodation.

‘Is there nothing you can do?’ I inquire, hoping that there might be some way they could help me after all.

‘No, sorry. Fully booked.’ In the background, I can hear another phone ringing, and I get the feeling Petra is itching to rush off and answer it. I feel like screaming: ‘Help! I’m still here and I still need to find a room.’ ‘Was there anything else, sir?’

‘Can you recommend somewhere else I might try?’ I inquire timidly. ‘Phew! Everyone’s fully booked at the moment… but you could try the Kürfürstenhof.’ I can tell from the tone of her voice that I’d better not try her patience by asking her for the number.

After such telephone conversations, I feel the urge to rush off and make an appointment with a therapist. It’s as if the money is out there lying on the streets but everyone’s too lazy to bend down and pick it up. Why, for heaven’s sake, didn’t Petra at least ask me for my name and address? After all, we might want to book a room with them some other time. A little customer marketing in the meantime wouldn’t go amiss. As a salesman, I find this unbelievable. I, a potential customer, phone them. And instead of informing me what services they can provide, all they can tell me is what they can’t do for me. I strike that hotel from my memory straight away.

In the end, however, I did manage to find a room, and not two weeks later, my girlfriend and I are sitting in the bar of the Hotel Kürfürstenhof. I order cappuccino. ‘We don’t serve cappuccino, only cafe au lait,’ the Austrian waiter tells me in a friendly but determined tone. He looks bored, and his eyes are already straying to the next table, where two new guests are just sitting down.

‘Um, excuse me,’ I reply, genuinely surprised. ‘Cappuccino is made of just coffee and milk, too. Foamed milk with cocoa powder on the top.’

‘Orders from the boss. I can’t do anything about it. I can bring you a coffee with Schlagobers on the top.’ ‘Er, what’s Schlagobers, please?’ I inquire. I’m just a poor Central European and unfamiliar with Tony the waiter’s Austrian dialect.

‘Whipped cream with cocoa on the top.’

‘Great!’ I tell him, and after consultation with my girlfriend I order two Austrian cappuccinos.

There’s another unexpected discovery when we ask for the bill. ‘That will be 10 euros and 80 cents,’ Tony tells us. We pay and have had quite enough of surprises for one day.

Amazingly good!

At one hotel chain (American, of course!) customers can state whether they would like their bookings confirmed by e-mail, SMS or fax in future.

In one cafe, I ordered a cafe au lait. The waitress asked me, ‘How much milk would you like in your cafe au lait, sir?’ ‘An espresso, please,’ I said to a waiter in South Tyrol, and was surprised when he inquired: ‘Which brand of espresso would you like?’ This excellent cafe offers a variety of coffees. Later he explained laconically, ‘There are many different teas, after all. So as coffee specialists, we offer a variety of coffees.’ In Nuremberg, I ordered a cappuccino and when it arrived, there was a heart sprinkled in the foamed milk on the top. Guaranteed to delight anyone!

When prospective customers phone the reservations desk of a hotel on Lake Achen, the staff always make a note of their name and address and ask whether they have a video recorder. Ten days later, they receive a video in the post with a 10-minute film about the hotel and the surrounding area. The friendly accompanying letter reads: ‘Pictures say more than a thousand words. We hope this film will introduce you to our hotel and make you look forward to your forthcoming stay with us.’ A very clever idea, because of course, when you have watched the film, you pass it on to friends, unlike a hotel brochure, which is likely to end up in the recycling bin. The hotel owner later told me that on average, five potential new guests watch a film before it is ‘disposed of’.