San Francisco lodge staff received cheated throughout the pandemic. Unhealthy vacationers are making it worse.

Lisa Qiu Li was the only person working on the ground a few weeks ago.

As a housekeeper at the Hotel InterContinental San Francisco, she has lived in San Francisco for more than 25 years – and has worked in hotels for 20 of them.

But on that August day she was confronted with a hotel guest. He was furious about the lack of new towels in his room and asked her to give him some immediately.

She had already given the last set to another customer who had just asked about it.

He broke out.

“He gets really mad at me and yells at me, ‘Is that a new towel? Give it to me! ‘”Recalls Li.

His harassment became so aggressive, Li said, that she feared he would physically beat her. She was hiding in the room she was cleaning up.

“I was really, really scared, and then I called the manager,” she said.

Li peered through the peephole, and when she saw that the customer had left, she ran to the elevators and asked to be moved to another floor – where hopefully she would not be bothered again.

Service employees of all stripes have dealt with bad people, especially during the pandemic. Poor dump trucks, unruly passengers, annoying customers; Rudeness and a lack of tact on the part of some members of the general public are a feature of working in any service industry.

But incidents like Li’s are becoming more common (and arguably less well known) for a variety of reasons.

The accommodations travelers were used to before the pandemic – think the daily cleaning of hotel rooms, fast room service, nightly bar service – have been all but eliminated by the coronavirus.

After all, the hotel industry – like other minor facets of the travel industry – was hammered hard.

Statistics from the San Francisco Travel Association estimate that hotel room demand was down 68% year over year in 2020 – the largest decline in at least 11 years and perhaps one of the largest declines in the country.

And while other service industries are on their way to recovering from the pandemic, as first reported by SF Weekly, the San Francisco travel industry has recovered more slowly than other industries.

But hotel workers and the unions they represent are especially angry that hotels continue to fall short with their workers even as the tide begins to stabilize for the travel industry as a whole. Li told SFGATE that there are at least 30 to 40 other cleaners who are still on leave and are still waiting in the wings to get back to work.

This, coupled with the “vengeance” phenomenon – the influx of jet-set tourists following a catastrophic event such as a pandemic – has created a confluence of problems for hotel workers.

Blanca Reyes coordinates housekeeping in the Hilton Financial District. She has worked for hotels for 31 years and says the work in the past few months has not been comparable to any experience in her three decades in the industry.

“It’s not like it used to be, it used to be very different from now.”

Hotel workers report that they were verbally abused.

Ralf Geithe / Getty Images / iStockphoto

Reyes told SFGATE that Hilton hotels have stopped cleaning all rooms on a daily basis (unless otherwise requested), which means that she has had to take angry calls from visitors for most of her shifts.

“The real stress we have is that the hotel, the company, didn’t assign the occupied rooms to be cleaned every day,” she said.

And, as Li noted, hotel guests who visit tend to stay much longer, which means that already strained housekeepers are forced to clean thoroughly after more guests. It is an added burden for workers who are already suffering from staff shortages.

This leads to incidents like the one she saw recently when a customer called her one evening and asked why his room was dirty.

“I said: ‘We don’t have any housekeeping on duty at the moment, everyone has gone home’. [he said], ‘You have to explain to me why my room isn’t ready,’ “she said.

“So I just tell him what the situation is like, why we don’t clean [his] Room. And he starts telling me, ‘Bitch, you have to tell me why my room isn’t ready.’ “

She endured worse verbal abuse, but refused to utter the words used to hit her. And with this harassment comes the fear of physical harm to workers. A 2015 study found that eight out of ten female hotel workers have experienced verbal harassment and incidents of assault and assault on workers have surfaced across the country.

Hotel workers in San Francisco won a strike in 2018 that guaranteed them “panic buttons” in dire situations.

A Hilton spokesman told SFGATE that workers are receiving “de-escalation training” with guests and that their hotels are actively looking for more workers.

“These hotels are working to ensure that they continue to provide a safe environment for both guests and team members,” the Hilton spokesman said in a statement to SFGATE.

(IHG, which manages the InterContinental, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from SFGATE.)

Sure, one could argue that given the challenges of the pandemic, hotels need to keep costs down – be it by reducing hours for workers or by reducing amenities for visitors. But now that travel is rushing again, the challenge of dealing with angry guests rests right on the shoulders of cleaners, cashiers and other hotel service staff.

May Lee works at the in-house Grab and Go at the Hilton in Union Square. And almost every other restaurant and food service in the hotel, she said, is closed for much of the week – even as hundreds of rooms fill up. This has resulted in long lines in front of their store, disgruntled customers and increased stress for guests and workers.

She remembered a guest waiting in line who was “so loud and angry that I could feel everyone in the cafe watching”.

And she knows that the guests won’t want to visit the hotel again because of a lack of staff.

“I’m so frustrated that we want to provide … good service to our guests so that they will come back,” she said. “Why do guests come back when they expect our hotel to be so tight that everything is closed and we can’t even do the basic things?”

As it stands, Lee’s fears are not entirely unfounded. At least four prominent hotel operators have announced plans to cut staff costs, the largest operational cost of running a hotel.

A Guardian report confirmed that at least three different hotel chain executives have pledged to cut full-time employees on investor calls.

The latest report on hotel cuts is from Hilton, which has two employees who spoke to SFGATE.

“The work we are currently doing with each of our brands is aimed at bringing them higher margin business and greater work efficiency, especially in the home, food and beverage and other sectors,” said Christopher Nassetta, CEO of Hilton during a February call with investors, several outlets reported.

Li, Reyes, Lee, and other San Francisco workers know they will be the ones to take the outrage over the cost reduction.

“Sometimes we’re the only ones working on the floor all day,” said Li. “The guests only see us, the guest doesn’t see the manager, they don’t see the boss on the floor, right, they only see the housekeeping see the ground so the hotel infuriates them and the guests [get] mad at us. “

None of the hotel employees really blamed the guests for being so angry. It just hurts that their anger is out of place.

“I’m not blaming them for having reasons, but it’s not because we created this problem,” Reyes said.

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