When I left my job in hospitality management in 2001 to go into journalism, I quipped that I was changing careers to decrease my on-the-job stress levels. My friends would laugh.
I wasn't joking.
From the outside, hospitality management might be all smiles, handshakes, lapel pins and manners. From the inside, though -- at least in the restaurant part of the industry, my family's chosen niche -- it consists largely of long hours, chemical addiction, familial issues, improper workplace relationships (the previous two items run hand and hand), anger-management issues and large dry-cleaning bills.
To say that a hospitality manager is sandwiched is an understatement, because a sandwich implies pressure from just two sides. Managers get static from all sides: upper management, owners, employees, purveyors and, of course, the all-important guests.
All of this makes the work less like being a sandwich and more like being a donut filling, only less healthy and garnering no love from Homer Simpson.
So the last thing I ever expected to stumble upon was a smartphone game app simulating the rigors of hospitality management. Yet that is exactly what Carlson Rezidor's Radisson badge debuted earlier this month.
"Rad Hotel by Radisson" was released, in part, to educate the smartphone set (some would say its sadistic outer fringes) about Radisson's "Yes I Can!" service motto. Players earn points by surviving various managerial tasks that start out at a leisurely pace but then speed up frenetically and appropriately, all with synth-jazz pumping out in the background.
Speed metal might have been a more realistic representation of the challenge.
Of course, all kinds of guests are represented, from newlyweds to the tanned family in shades to a couple with a baby that looks like one of those old Monchichi dolls to the ever-present Unshaven Hipster Dude.
This is where the fun starts. A short line of guests is waiting patiently (the software's first glitch) to get checked in to two vertical stacks of single-bed or double-bed guestrooms. It rapidly devolves into a cacophony of phones and bellhop bells, vacuum cleaners starting up, shuttle horns honking and sundry other sounds as the manager checks guests in, hires and sends for repairmen and directs guests to the fitness center, on-site restaurant, business center or outside excursions.
All the while, the manager can get reinforcements simply by "adding" available rooms (I'm hearing the sound of a thousand hotel developers guffawing) and by hiring on-site and outside help (the vendors arrive immediately, so that's another programming glitch).
A CliffsNotes version would be akin to the poor woman in those Calgon bubble bath ads from the '70s: "The traffic! The boss! The baby! The dog! That does it! Calgon, take me away!"
The amusing thing is that there are a million other elements that could have been thrown into the app to ratchet up the reality quotient. How to deal with staffing no-shows. Or what about the guest who wants to change rooms three times. Or how to tactfully remove a guest after he tries to sneak his dog onto a no-pets property (OK, maybe that's just my issue). Bedbugs, anyone?
Meanwhile, the game depicts a dissatisfied guest who's had to wait too long for service with a circular frowny face flying across the screen. Sure, that might signify sad, but it's not nearly as damaging as having Unshaven Hipster Dude slamming out a flaming tweet on his smartphone and watching the line of guests instantly disappear.
How did I do on the game? I scored about 8,000 points on my first go-round, tripled that number on my second try. As of last week, the all-time high-scorer had knocked out more than 738,000 points. Maybe that player was a member of the Carlson family. Or a distant relative of Bill Marriott. Or God.
Radisson calls "Rad Hotel" the industry's first mobile management-simulation game and says its venture into the mobile gaming world allows existing and future guests to connect with the brand "in a new way that is unique [among] our competitors."
The company's timing is fortuitous, as Carlson Rezidor, its parent company, is in the midst of a five-year capital improvement plan in which the company's North American properties are getting about $1.5 billion in upgrades.
Still, from a personal standpoint, I couldn't help but think that the game is less a marketing push and more a cautionary tale about life in the hospitality industry.
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, the job turnover rate within the lodging and food services industries for the month of September (the most recent month tracked) was 5.3%, which annualizes out to about a 65% turnover rate. That's about 15 percentage points higher than the annualized turnover rate for the retail industry, which isn't exactly a model of workplace stability.
In fact, one might just as well get a handle on hospitality management by finding a video of CBS's "Undercover Boss" episode from last year featuring Diamond Resorts International CEO Stephen Cloobeck.
"Incognito" in a full rocker wig and glasses, Cloobeck, among other things, almost blows up a roof air-conditioning unit, inhales a bunch of paint fumes and gets chastised by a co-worker for slouching at the front desk. He also notably blew his cover (and almost his top) after one of his reservationists wasn't giving the full "Yes I Can!" attitude to a number of callers.
Still, give "Rad Hotel" credit for one thing: After too many frowny faces shoot across the screen and the "Game Over" indicator pops up, the formerly cheery hotel manager is shown downcast, disheveled, holding a clipboard with a torn checklist and in tears.
Yep, that about covers it.
Contact Danny King at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @dktravelweekly.