Journals of a Hotel Manager

8AM, February 2, 2002

Ironically, the rain stopped as the day broke. It turned out to be a beautiful sunny day. As the flood ceased to rise, we turned our focus on what to do with over 350 guests in house. The lack of electricity was the main obstacle. Luckily in February it was not too stifling indoors without air-conditioning. The highest floor of the hotel was 18 which meant that guests had to walk down 18 flights of stairs just to have breakfast. With no power, Chef found a small kerosene burner and started cooking omelets on the pool deck.

I gathered a few mobile phones from the staff and began calling for news from the city authorities. I drained the batteries of 2 phones without any good news. All the main roads were inaccessible and whatever transportation I could find would not be able to reach us or to pull up onto the front door. The worst news was that the road to the airport was also closed off due to flood. It meant that I needed to relocate all my guests to hotels that still had electricity.

I turned to hotels in the area. My only question was, “My hotel is flooded. How many guests can you take?” Most GMs were gracious and accepted my guests at cutthroat rates. One major international brand known for its F&B innovation coldly refused to accommodate a single guest of mine, although it was the largest and the closest to my hotel. A small European brand hotel was the only one to call me to offer help. They took in twenty guests. One hotel even offered to send cars to pick up my guests.

As the day went by, a couple of staff who lived not far swam across the sewage river to report for duty. Later on during the day, more staff would arrive and some of them walked for 3 hours due to lack of public transportation. The majority of them left their own homes in the flood to come to work.

We set up different stations in the lobby so guests could sign up for different hotel options. Most guests were calm and understood that it was not our fault. Once they knew their new hotel destination, a few even went to sit by the pool and read a book. Now we started to source for transportation.

Lunch for the guests was on the pool deck as Chef’s little kerosene burner produced fried lobster rice, foie gras sandwiches, tenderloin wraps to avoid expensive food going to waste without refrigeration.  All the staff ate whatever food was left over from the over night shift in the cold and darkened staff cafeteria.  No one had much appetite.

The afternoon droned on and I took a couple of staff to scout out the hotel boundaries for damage assessment. The flyover behind the hotel was jam-packed with cars in a standstill. Since the center of the city was flooded, the commuters from the outskirts could neither go forward nor back up, thus creating a massive traffic jam.

Our hotel was literally surrounded by a moat of sewage. Cars parked on the street were submerged to the roof. Local children could not go to school so they merrily jumped in and out of the temporary river, oblivious to the disgusting content. Men who missed work sat idly by the sewage and some even brought out their fishing gear. Ignorant of the dangerous ingredient of gallons of gasoline leaked from our back-up generator, many of them were smoking and flicking the cigarette butts into the river. It was another disaster waiting to happen.

We needed to get the guests out fast. I secured hotel rooms for all my guests around the city. The only remaining question was how to ferry the guests and their luggage across the sewage river to the nearest accessible road.