Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Furama City Centre Hotel - A partial timeline of painful customer service

Furama City Centre
60 Eu Tong Sen Street
Singapore 059804
Tel: 65-6533-3888

Recommendation: Never stay here. Ever.

Day 1:
Check in at 12:30AM. Phone does not work. Go downstairs and tell staff to fix it - engineer to come up soon. Wait 15 minutes, still no one. I want to tell them to forget it, but I have no phone, so I have to go to use the elevator bank hotel phone on my floor. Oh, that one doesn't work either. I make the trip downstairs and tell them to fix it tomorrow.

Day 2:
Get back to room in evening, and phone is still out. Go downstairs (b/c the hotel phone at the elevator is still out). No one checked the phone. As a matter of fact, the person who told me they would check, asked me, "Do you know who you spoke to?" YOU!!!

Day 3:
(Same as Day 2, but the phone company came and can't fix it... somehow). So I do a room change next door at 11PM. Internet doesn't work. After some language problems, they send someone up. Their cable is broken, so they replace it.

Day 4:
No problems.

Day 5:
Get woken up by construction directly on top of my room. Change rooms at 11AM on Saturday. Evening comes, and I get frozen b/c the room's A/C is stuck at 23 degrees.

Day 6:
In AM, tell them to fix A/C. Result? A/C is stuck at 22 degrees

Day 7:
In AM, tell them to fix A/C. Result? No information... call up and after 10 rings at the front desk, and being on hold for 10 minutes, tell me someone 2 days ago "checked it". Great, ... what did they do? Did they fix it? No.. instead they made it colder. Tell them to fix it again tomorrow.

Day 8: ...TBC

3 comments:

cosmicd said...

That's Singapore for you then. Very little sense of customer service perhaps due to their laid back business culture. Or perhaps the fact that you weren't a westerner resulted in sub-standard service!

Polks said...

I think this had nothing to do with race, as my caucasion boss had the same issues. I haven't had the pleasure of staying at a 5 star hotel here, but my previous stay at the Meritus Mandarin (not Oriental) had poor service too, but not nearly as bad as FURAMA.

cosmicd said...

I guess it is really a lack of service mentality then. Was at the Mandarin Oriental in October 2006, although we had the "do not disturb" light on, the housekeeping staff decided to bang on our door anyway. And we had requested ice 3 nights in a row and they never ever took away the bucket from the night before--so we had 3 ice buckets. Stayed at the Shangri-la in 2004, where I was running an event. Staff was slow, not that responsive, meeting room wasn't quiet enough. Must have been spoiled by Hong Kong standards!