Travel - Sharing hotel rooms
mzihc
27 Posts
I'm looking for information on how other organizations handle this and what the issues are that we would be facing.
We are a small CA company (less than 50). About twice a year we have events which require the majority of our staff to travel. In trying to cut costs, we have (1) one year required people pair up and share rooms and (2) one year allowed for individual rooms but provided an incentive to those who chose to share rooms. I haven't been involved in the next event planning but I have an employee who wants to discuss her arrangements with me for an upcoming event. It appears as though she was to arrive the night before and it was decided to have her arrive the morning of, and was told in email if she wanted to be at the hotel the night before she could share with her manager. The employee is required to be at this function.
I understand the need to review costs, however, I'm not sure about how some of this has been handled to date. This one may be less of a concern than other situations as I think the time frames involved would allow her to drive in that morning, albeit early, but still within occasional expected work hours.
Anybody else deal with a similar issues?
Comments
This topic has been debated a few times here on this forum. There are those that want to save the money and think it is ok if people share rooms. Others think there are liability issues with doing this.
One of the things my company has been doing lately is to find hotels (Residence Inn is a good one) that has 2 bedroom suites. These hotel rooms are cheaper than paying for 2 different hotel rooms per night. My employees like this idea much better than the thought of sharing a room with someone else.
In your case, the first question I have for you, is why the employees feels she needs to be there the night before? The company is saying she can drive there the day of the event. I would find out her reason why and then you can go from there.
In this particular case, she was the only one of 11 who was not going to have a hotel room that evening/only one who had a room and then had it taken away. So if she could drive the next morning, so could the others. I believe she felt singled out.
The Residence Inn idea is good but really doesn't work for us. Our events are company sponsored conferences so the employees stay at the hosting hotel.
I will look through the older posts to see if I can find more information on the whole sharing rooms thing. If anybody has any further comments, please feel free to help me out.....
Just a thought, but have you considered potential health and/or privacy concerns? I have sleep apnea. It's a wonder my wife has stayed with me. I can't share a room and expect the other person to get any sleep. Allergies could be an issue. Perhaps a person has some type of prosthetic that no one knows about and the person wants to keep it that way. Any number of emotional issues.
Maybe not in your group ----- yet. Just food for thought. [:^)]
There's always a business person, usually a sales type, who thinks all this fuss is a bunch of malarky because it'll never happen to them. And they may be right. On the other hand, if they're wrong, it can be very expensive. I don't think there's any question as to whether or not shared rooms increase the odds of having a problem. The only question is whether anybody perceives the problem to be a real possibility or respects the enormous impact a problem could have on business.
Business people make decisions every day about assuming risks and chalking it up to the costs of doing business, which can make them callous about common sense decisions.