Any hôtelier who has seen the film 'Midnight in Paris' will have had a thrill of recognition when viewing the scene in which, an hotel guest takes a pair of earrings from his fiancée to give to his new found love ; when the eearring's owner notices that they are missing, her mother immediately blames the chambermaid and exclaims "It's ALWAYS the maid!".
Sadly, this is the reaction of many hotel guests when they notice that something has gone missing from his/her luggage or room. In my thirty years in the hotel business, I have heard it several times, but so far have never seen it verified. Of course, it could happen and we must take any such claims very seriously. But one must also allow for the possibility that the guest may be mistaken, for example when the jewellery or i-pod that the guest was absolutely certain had been in her luggage turns up in a desk drawer at home, which it had never left. Or when the guest is trying to cover up some other, personal lapse, such as the expensive watch stolen from the night-stand when the guest returned to the hotel late at night accompanied by someone he or she had just met in a bar. Is one ever quite certain that the new-found love one has invited on a naughty week-end is completely trustworthy? Or has one's teen-age daughter spent too much of her pocket-money and taken a short-cut to mummy's pocket-book in order to make up the shortfall? As an hotelier, we have the moral and legal obligation both to our clients and to our staff to remain absolutely impartial when such claims are made and allow for all possible explanations. Not that we doubt the sincerity of the client, but in the stress of noticiing that something has disappeared, a client's judgement and memory may not be as reliable as he or she thinks. And we do have to allow for the (rare) possibility that sometimes a client may be trying to put a fast one over on us.
In the present case, the client reported that money had disappeared from the luggage he had entrusted to us upon his arrival and although in his review he now acknowledges the possibility that it might have been stolen at some point in transit (although he remains convinced it was not based on... his feeling), at the time he was quite adamant that the theft had occurred in the hotel. Any luggage entrusted to us kept in a locked room, until the client's room is ready at which point it is transferred to the guest room. Both the luggage room and the guest rooms are equipped with electronic locks that keep a record of when they are opened and by whose key. This allows us to verify whether there have been any suspicious openings. Beyond ascertaining which staff-members were on duty and that there were no unauthorised entries into either the luggage room or the guest-room, there was nothing we could do other than request urge the guest to file a complaint at the local police station enabling them to investigate. Theft is a police matter ; as a private business we do not have the legal authority to interrogate our staff, nor de we have the skills to check the client's luggage for fingerprints, etc.
We do tend to trust our staff : most of them have worked with us for a long time and many clients are unbelievably careless when it comes to leaving cash, jewellery and expensive electronic gizmos strewn all over their rooms, instead of putting them in the safe we provide in each room. If there was a thief in our midst, he or she would have a field day! Still, one can never know and therefore we would have welcomed a police inquiry that would have allowed a proper and thorough investigation in the hopes that it would either identify the thief and allow us to take appropriate legal action, or lift any suspicions the client had. Sadly the client seemed to make a personal issue of this, taking offence at our unwillingness to give unquestioning credence to his allegation. Exactly what course of action would have pleased him is unclear. Sack the entire staff on duty that day? Dip into the till and start handing out banknotes with apologies? The client had just arrived in Paris so was not rushing to catch a train or a flight ; the police station is about a five-minute walk from the hotel and we would have been delighted to show him where it was if he had not stalked off in high dudgeon. He says he felt his French would have been inadequate to filing a report, but contrary to what he seems to believe, the French police are not uneducated oafs, they do go to school and many of them have enough English to understand when someone says they think they have been robbed. If he had only been willing to set the legal wheel in motion by taking the time to file a complaint, we should have been very happy to provide the police with any and all information at our disposal, in everyone's interest.
I must disagree when the client says that directing him to to the police was a failing in customer relations : it was the only course of action open to us in keeping with our legal responsibilites both to the client and to our staff. I am sorry he could not understand this.