During the fires, our daughter, who lives in LA, evacuated. Randomly, her older sister was visiting. Once they decided to leave, there was enough anxiety, so I worked on getting them hotel rooms in Costa Mesa. I thought they should be near John Wayne airport if they needed to get out.
I went online to book two hotel rooms. I was on my laptop, and the flurry of pop-up ads from Travelocity to Expedia was infuriating. Also, Marriot didn’t want to book a room until they signed you up to become patron of Marriott. I closed my laptop and attempted to use my phone, thinking the experience might be better, but it was wrong.
I could not book two rooms and after thirty minutes I dipped. Eventually, although not easy, I found a phone number to book rooms the old-fashioned way. The man who answered began by reading the same rhetoric to sign me up. I quickly stopped him so he could book the rooms and asked him to only focus on what I needed. He was excellent, and I scored two rooms.
The entire experience was rattling and depressing. This is the experience people have to go through to book a hotel? Its awful. These software systems haven’t been upgraded since 1996. Marriot should be embarrassed.
This past weekend, we ended up at a Ritz Carlton in Cleveland that Marriott now owns. It is far from what it used to be, but that’s okay. More on that later.
We go to the bar and order two diet cokes. The bartender says we carry Pepsi; is that ok? We all say no thank you, and then she says Oh, well, we do have Diet Coke, but we are a Pepsi company, so we have to tell that to the customer first. Phew. She tells us it is because the owner of Marriott had a problem years ago with the Coca-Cola owners, so they carry Pepsi. Has Marriot brain washed their staff?
I mean, come on, Pepsi pays to be the cola that’s carried and pushed. Although not shocking, most people take the Pepsi when offered; we had to ask.
We return to the bar after dinner, and the TV is locked to a non-local channel because that’s how they do it. They do not have access to change the channels. I kept looking around to see what other deals Marriot did to bring in the cash they needed to keep a company of that size showing profits. The hotel was barely half full.
Money makes the world go round. We have got to a place where there is no soul. The mall that was attached to the Ritz was grim. Seventy-five percent of the mall stores were empty; the food court had a few spots, making the most unhealthy food imaginable. We have reached a point where publicly traded companies have destroyed the community fabric. We are seeing it at ski resorts, where Vail could give a shit about the locals and the slopes, we are seeing it as large companies pull out of cities because they aren’t making any money leaving huge swathes of real estate empty, and a need for products that can not only be bought online.
Technology is not going to save this. We need to rebalance everything. I could go on and on, but the real question is, how do we make our way back?
