australian rozie

I am quoting my brother Jme with the above statement.
This is a story about what should be a simple and painless Mother’s Day lunch.
Firstly, I googled “high tea at swissotel sydney” because I wanted to make a booking for this Sunday. The first thing that comes up is the review of high tea at the Swissotel on the awesome foodie blog Grab your fork. Nowhere on the first Google page is any link to the Swissotel itself. So I look up their site another way and there is NOTHING about the High Tea that is supposed to be offered at their hotel bar/restaurant. Also, there is no phone number easily found on their homepage. Like duh! So I go back to Grab your Fork and there are all the contact details neatly at the end of the review. I call up the hotel:
Rozie: “Hello, I’d like to make a booking for Sunday for High Tea.”
Hotel Girl: “High Tea??? Oh, umm…” Not a good start. She puts me through to the “bar”.
Male with strong Asian accent: Err, Umm, booking? It will be $35…Err, umm, can I have your credit card number… (something about securing the booking).
I kind of didn’t want to give this unprofessional sounding guy my credit card details, but I did because I didn’t want to miss out on the Mother’s Day booking. So I give him all the booking details a “normal” place would need. I got off the phone with a slightly bad feeling…
Sunday (Mother’s Day) comes along and I need to add one person to the booking. So I get my brother to call up.
Jme: “Hi, I’d like to confirm a booking for today and add one more person, here is the name, time etc”
Hotel person: “Err umm, ummmmmm… we don’t have your booking”.
WTF???
Anyway, Jme made sure that there would be a table for us when we arrived at Swissotel an hour later.
So, the service when we arrived was a bit random, most of the staff are young and obviously inexperienced. On a positive note, there was plenty of food and a lot of variety from savoury to sweet which was nicely presented. The chocolate fountain didn’t seem to be working properly and the chocolate tasted a bit yuck which was a disappointment. It was quite busy but the place wasn’t packed out. When it came to paying the bill, I noticed that it said $45 per person. I think it was the manager who was taking our money. I told him that the guy on the phone told me it was $35. The “manager” said it was actually $45 because it was Mother’s Day. At this point, I decided to tell him all about my previous experience with this lunch. He was somewhat apologetic and exasperated. I know that there is a shortage of decent wait staff in this city… but that ain’t my problem. The manager of this hotel needs to get the staff’s $hit together. He did give me a small box of chocolates (as some kind of compensation) but that’s not going to stop me blogging with an iron fist. So, I gave him my business card, and now I wait to see if the Swissotel will follow up on my complaints. Of course, this is not the only place I’ve been to in Sydney with questionable service, but I just haven’t the time to blog about every experience. Wish I was a professional blogger!
Phew – glad I got that of my chest.