Tl;dr – I tend to stay away from these stories but every once in a while, these stories find you.
I was minding my own business and fired up the internet’s favorite ‘grab bag’ Reddit to find this anecdote in the r/hyatt waiting for me at the top of my feed. Redditor Enripsa recounted their experience at the Chengdu Langbo, part of Hyatt’s Unbound Collection in Chengdu, Sichuan, China:
“Currently on vacation and wanted to get a massage/spa treatment nearby, and decided on one inside an upscale Hyatt property, trusting it’d be safe and reliable. Unfortunately, I was instead offered happy-endings and additional nonstandard service. After my initial rejection, the “masseuse” proceeded to beg me throughout the entire rest of the allocated service time with minimal actual service.”
My favorite line of the post comes next:
“I understand Hyatt doesn’t operate all the services in their hotel but this seems completely not in line with Hyatt.”
“This seems completely not in line with Hyatt.” Hahaha. You think?
With this being the internet – Reddit, in particular – the comment section went about how’d you imagine:
One Redditor referenced a piece from BoardingArea’s own One Mile At A Time in their response.
It’d be easy to chalk this up to this property being a soft-brand hotel. Independent hotels are often left to their own devices for day-to-day operations, save for upholding the brand standards and contractual offerings of a loyalty program. Training might not be as thorough, and one might be quick to say this wouldn’t happen at, say, a Hyatt Regency or Grand Hyatt – a core brand. In reality, it’s naive to believe that this sort of thing doesn’t happen in many places, and in many different types of hotels.
Taking away the fact that this is the internet and all of this could be made up, at face value, it’s obviously not a great look for Hyatt here.
Here’s a screenshot of the full post:
