Slides That Follow Your Voice: Italian Accent Staff Training

Slide 1: Welcome to the Belvista

0:17Good morning, and welcome to the Belvista. Some of you I met at the interview, some of you I met this morning at the coffee machine, and one of you I have known since you were born, uh, Luca, so no, you do not get a bigger room. [laughs]

0:32This is the first of three mornings together before we open on the twenty-eighth. Today is the front desk. Tomorrow is housekeeping and the restaurant, and on Thursday we do the lift, which needs its own morning, and you will understand why when you meet it.

Slide 2: Three mornings

0:48Let me start with the only rule I will ask you to memorise. Three minutes. From the moment a guest comes through that door to the moment they have a key in their hand and know where they are going, three minutes. Not because we are in a hurry, okay? Because they are tired.

Slide 3: 3 minutes

1:06Our average guest has driven three, no, four hours and forty minutes from the city, behind a truck on the lake road, and the kindest thing you can do for a tired person is to be fast and then disappear.

1:21So here is the flow. You stand up. Always. Not because you are a servant, let's say, but because a person who stands up is a person who has noticed you.

Slide 4: The flow: stand, name, key, go

1:32You say their name before they say it, because the booking tells you who is arriving today, and there are forty-two rooms, not four hundred, so you can know. You give the key, you give the Wi-Fi card, you point to the lift and to the stairs, and you say one true sentence about tonight. My father, who is upstairs pretending not to listen, used to give the whole history of the building at check-in. Fourteen minutes. I timed him. The guests were very polite, and then they asked me, quietly, where the room was. Papa, if you can hear me, I am not saying it was bad. It was long. Okay. Where was I. The key. The lake is calm this evening. The kitchen closes at half past nine. The cake is lemon. One sentence, and then you let them go.

2:24Now, the things that will go wrong, because they will. The lift gets stuck between the second and the third floor, more or less once a week. It is not dangerous, it is sixty-one years old and it is stubborn, and the red button that fixes it is behind the desk, and you press it once, you do not press it um... eleven times, Luca. [chuckles] Luca. Luca, you are laughing. You did it. It was you. Okay, maybe you were eight, but still.

Slide 5: The lift

2:56You tell the guest through the door that it happens, that it takes forty seconds, and that you are sorry. You do not say it is normal. It is normal, but nobody wants to hear that their lift is normally broken.

3:10The late arrival. Every season somebody arrives at twenty to midnight, with children asleep in the car, having taken the wrong exit at Varese. You will be tempted to do the full welcome. Do not.

Slide 6: Twenty to midnight

3:24Key, number, the room, sorry, let me say it in order. Key, room number, where to park, breakfast is from seven. Everything else can wait until the morning, when they are human again.

3:39The complaint. When a guest complains, and they will, about the pillows, about the lake being on the wrong side of the room, you do two things in order. First, you write it down, in front of them, on paper. Second, you say what you will do and when.

Slide 7: The complaint

3:58Nobody has ever stormed out of this hotel because of a pillow. People storm out because they feel they were not heard, they were not heard.

4:11Last thing. My grandmother opened this hotel in nineteen sixty-four with nine rooms and one rule, which she wrote on a card by the desk, and which is still there, under the glass, in her handwriting. On the back of the card, in pencil, she also wrote, never run out of lemons. It is not on the front, but we have never run out. I do not know why I am telling you this. It felt important. Okay. It says: they are not customers, they are guests, and they are tired. [sighs]

Slide 8: They are guests, and they are tired

4:46Everything I have told you this morning is that card, with examples.

4:51Coffee, ten minutes, and then we do the booking system, which is newer than the lift. Not by much. No? Fine. You will see on Thursday.