Out of Office: The Story Behind 'Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel'

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers and members share their business travel advice and stories from life on the road. Read all the posts here.

Have a bad hotel or airline experience? Today you can fight back with social media, but it wasn’t always so. In 2000, my colleague Tom Farmer and I rolled into Houston at 2 a.m. and headed straight for the DoubleTree Club. We had guaranteed our room with a credit card and called in advance to say we’d be late. But the soon-to-be famous Night Clerk Mike had given our room away and had none to spare. As you’ll see in the SlideShare, he was also not very helpful. In fact, he was the opposite of helpful. He and helpful lived in separate zip codes.

Sitting around the lounge that night, we talked about creating a presentation about the experience called “Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel.” (For the record, Tom Farmer wrote it.) We sent it to the DoubleTree and a few friends.

Of course, we didn’t expect anything, because in those days nothing really went viral. Most people didn’t even know what the word meant. But there’s a first for everything, and in the following weeks our presentation was seemingly viewed by every person with an email account. We got thousands of replies and calls — and even made national news. Believe it or not, 14 years later the presentation lives on as a part of the curriculum at many business schools.

If you’re wondering what happened to the hotel, they offered to refund our money and give us a free stay. Instead, we asked them to donate $1,000 to a charity, which they did. Night Clerk Mike kept his job, though he and the rest of the staff had to go through sensitivity training. And we never stayed at a DoubleTree Club again.

So if you haven’t already seen “Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel,” please enjoy!