Its true what Colin said, you can never escape pest control – even when you’re on holiday. And this holiday tale didn’t happen to me – it happened to a Mummy friend of mine. (Thanks for the blog fodder though – you know who you are).
So, a family holiday had been planned, my friend, her husband and young daughter were going for a mid-week staycation (and I mean staycation as in they stayed in the UK rather than they stayed at home) at a well known UK pine-lodge based holiday resort. The first three days were amazing, so she told me… and then on the evening of day three it went a bit, well, wrong.
Coming back to the chalet after dinner, she switched on the light to hear something scurry across the living room. She didn’t see what it was exactly, so her husband went to investigate and tracked the source of the noise to the sofa and quickly over-turned it. He’s not He-Man or anything, it was just fairly light. To their disgust they found what looked like a well-established nest, and a very scared looking mole promptly evacuated the premises through their open front door.
Now aside from the obvious issue of poor cleaning (you’d have thought housekeeping would have noticed), the fact that the little girls cot was inches off the ground and therefore could have been in contact with said creature is what concerned my friend more.
So off they went to Reception to demand assistance. The comment from the young and rather bored looking young man went along the lines of: “You’ll have to wait till the morning when my manager gets in”. Further questioning elicited the same response so they did what any concerned parent would; they packed up and left in the middle of the night.
Now casual intruder pest problems are hard to plan for with respect to pest control (e.g. wasps, spiders, and our friend Mr Mole in this story), but the response from the Duty Manager was clearly unacceptable. Several verbal and written exchanges later and I can inform you that they did receive a full refund, mainly because of the poor service offered by the young Duty Manager in question.
Can you imagine what would happen if we provided such poor service? Your businesses and homes would be over-run with pests!
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3 Comments
Too right they should get a refund. I hope this well known national holiday resort has increased its efforts in terms of housekeeping since this incident! Housekeeping is very important to try to prevent pest problems ocurring in the first place.
With the resurgence of bedbugs, I have come across quite a number of sofas that were infested with bedbugs, sometimes in private places, but sometimes also in restaurants. especially bad when you are waiting to be seated and later on realize you got a lot of bites
Speaking of bites, well I remember I was “ambushed” by some cat fleas when I was surveying a premise. Even though I was dressed in long sleeve shirt and pants, but when I was exiting the premise, I was looking like a polka-dots Pink Panther as there were uncountable bites on me. OMG it was soooooooooooooooo itchy for sooooooooooooooo many days. And to my horror, my bf finds the pink dots looking cute on me!
It’s really scary to have these kind of small yet deadly creatures living under the same roof as you, and the reason they were able to “check-in” was due to the poor maintenance of housekeeping. If anyone has had checked the premise regularly then things would not have been so serious. Bear in mind, the cost to company’s goodwill being damaged is far greater than the costs of regular housekeeping and proper pest control combined.