Germany 2019 day 1 - The day which was more miss than hit

So this has been a pretty crazy day with hardly anything going our way. We left my parents' place around 11am to go to the airport. We had done the online check-in thing the day before and so we just went to one of those check-in machines to print our boarding passes and luggage tags. Then we went to do the bag drop. The lady there shows my dad ahead to the queue to the bag drop, but she stops me and tells me to go somewhere else because I already have the tag. She says I don't have to stand in line, I can just scan it myself and sent my bag away. My dad has the tag too so when he hears this he leaves the queue to go with me to the automatic bag drop. My dad's bag scans fine, but ofc mine doesn't. So it takes us a couple tries to make it scan right. But finally the machine approves and sends my bag away. We move on to the security checkpoint, which for once is very fast (at least we had that working for us) and then we move on to exchange money and grab something to eat before our plane departs. After lunch we start walking to our gate which is usually somewhere in the middle of the airport, but this year it had been moved to the farthest end possible and it took us probably 20 minutes to even get there. We sit down and wait and when there's ten minutes until boarding starts they announce that the plane is overbooked by eight people and they would like eight people to volunteer to stay behind in Copenhagen for a few more hours and then go to Düsseldorf via Frankfurt later in the evening. Also receiving €150 as compensation. Three people volunteered. When it was actually time for the boarding to start they upped the compensation to €250 and two more volunteered. Still not enough so they picked eight people according to the list that would have to stay behind. Luckliy neither my dad or I was on that list. We got on the plane (the tiniest plane I've ever seen, if anyone was obese they wouldn't have even been able to get on it). Took forever to get the boarding done because the plane was so tiny and then we just stood there waiting. Then we finally got rolling and then we stood there again for a long time. Then we got rolling and we got all the way to the edge of the driveways. Where we had to stop again because they were deicing the plane before us and that took forever. We finally left Copenhagen 45 minutes late.

The pilot rushed through the whole thing to the point where only the members got appropriate service and the rest of us had to chug our coffee, without even getting a chance to buy something to eat should we want to. We land in Düsseldorf and the deboarding was just as much of a mess as the boarding because tiny planes have no room to move about in, and to stand up straight by your seat you'd have to be no taller than 5 feet or 150 cm. Bus to the terminal, pick up our bags, then from the terminal to the airport train station we got on the Sky Train (which is pretty cool tbh) and then we hurried to buy our tickets for the train only to miss it by 30 seconds and then have to wait 25 minutes for the next one. 40 minutes spent on the train and then I was really looking forward to just get to my room and relax a bit before dinner. This day had different plans.

We got to the hotel, which wasn't the same as we usually stay at. There were two receptionists, both of whom seemed completely uninterested in doing their jobs and totally lacked any kind of service-mindedness. First of all we had to fill out a form to make ourselves exempt from the city tax because we were there to work, and then we had to fill out yet another form. I think some kind of guest information form. They had computers but this hotel seemed very old-school. They even had that wall with actual room keys hanging from it. Actual keys. Wow. I've been staying at different hotels in different countries almost every year for the past 25 years and I've never seen that. That's extremely old-school to me.

I got to my room by way of an elevator the scared the shit out of me every time it stopped because it stopped with a slight bounce making me feel like it would just drop. Then I got to my room and struggled with the lock and as soon as I got the door open I could hear the radiator clanking. I tried turning the knob on it but that just changed the noise from clanking to a very loud hissing. Great. I decided to try to grab my power bank for my poor dying phone from my suitcase before going down to the lobby and demand a new room. Couldn't open my suitcase. I have never set a code, it's always been on the default 000. But the dials must've gotten rolled around somehow during transport and somehow I had received a code without meaning to. I started to try combinations, but just got more pissed by the annoyance of the constant clanking/hissing from the radiator that I just grabbed all my stuff and went to my dad's room. He struggled a bit with the suitcase but managed to get it open. And then he came with me to my room to have a look at the radiator. He also struggled with the lock to my door and he couldn't get the radiator to shut up. So we went down to the lobby and I asked for another room. She said to wait five minutes and while we waited she checked in another guest and then told us to wait another five minutes. Another guest came down and complained that he couldn't have the room he'd got due to his asthma and the smoke from the nextdoor restaurant got in there. He got a new room, no problems. Then I asked. The receptionists asked what the problem was with the room I told them and they told me that they were full and couldn't change today unless I wanted a room at a sister hotel. I asked them why they could change rooms for the guest before me but not for me, and they pretended to not know what I was talking about. But after some annoyed talking and me actually knowing the room from which the earlier guest had changed, I managed to get the room above the restaurant. It was quiet and slightly bigger. Much better. When I grabbed my luggage from my old room I decided to slip them my business card where it clearly states my position at the hotel I'm working at. Like a quiet way to tell them that I know every trick in the book, I know what they are doing and what they should be doing and how they should behave. When the receptionist noticed she tried to get me to sign another form because I had given her a business card. I took the card back and went to my new room absolutely fuming. I quickly unpacked and then went back to my dad's room. I had to walk by the lobby and the receptionist calls to me that we already had that form and "my" business card. No, they don't. They have my dad's business card attached to the form that exempts us from the city tax. I told her that if she had bothered to look at the cards she'd see they are not the same. But that it doesn't matter.

My dad and I left and went to look for dinner. We ended up inside the old and trusty Löwenbräu and each had a really good burger and a couple beers. Then we decided to have an early night. We each went up to our rooms and I had a shower and changed into jammies.

The situation with my room and the receptionists and the general appearance of this hotel appalls me. If we had acted anything even close to how those two receptionists were acting we'd get an earful from the manager. Their behaviour was lacking in all aspects. No interest, barely any attention, no smiles, no courtesy, no service-mindedness. They did the minimum required for their guests but nothing more, nothing extra. If a guest had come down to us complaining about a room and asking for a change we would've changed that room, no questions asked. All we need is a reason for the change. Even if the hotel was fully booked. Because if all guests haven't arrived yet, then we have the means to change. Changing to another hotel is a last resort thing, it's not something you do just because somebody wants to change a room early in the evening.

I've half a mind to actually tell them off tomorrow and slip them my card again. And also for once I'll be the one to leave a scathingly bad review on TripAdvisor, rather than having to respond to one.