Lessons on Complaining and Making the Most of the Situation
A few years back in December, my family and I were on vacation in some beach hotels in Mombasa. It has been our tradition to go to Mombasa every year during December for as long as I can remember. That particular year, we went to different hotels located in different areas from our usual ones since we all wanted a change.
To our dismay, the service sucked!
First of all, the food was hardly ever enough for all the hotel guests despite the fact that it was all buffet. If you arrived at the dining hall an hour past the start of meal times, you were likely to find some food items depleted and they were unlikely to be replenished. In addition, the cutlery was also not enough. You would seat down to have a meal and discover you lacked a knife, or a fork, or a spoon. The waiters and waitresses were few and spread out so signalling to one was almost futile. You were forced to ‘steal’ some cutlery from an empty table next to yours.
At the pool side, one was forced to carry their own towels since the hotel didn’t provide any. Getting beach beds and their mattresses was a race among hotel guests as to who woke up first, and ‘booked’ theirs by unceremoniously dumping their towels and clothes on it.
There were no porters on arrival so we had to lug our luggage all the way to our rooms, climbing up two flights of stairs in the humid heat of the coastside. In the rooms, the AC wasn’t working and we had to wait for a technician to come sort it out.
To sum it all up:
Inadequate food, limited utensils, unhelpful and disorganized staff…things looked sucky!
We were angry, moody, disappointed, frustrated and our dream vacation was shattered before it could even begin. That was to be expected of course. To make matters worse, we were booked there for about a week, and even if we had decided to check out and demand for a refund, their refund policy would essentially have screwed us. All other hotels were probably also fully booked (December is peak season), so we were stranded as well.
That’s when my father declared: “We have 1 of 2 choices: either we complain throughout and ruin our trip, or choose to enjoy ourselves despite the setbacks and have a great time.”
We chose the latter.
It wasn’t easy nor glamorous. It meant arriving for meals as soon as the doors were opened, carrying all our food -from appetizers to dessert- to the table and piling them all up before we had even sat down, and reusing cutlery lest the waiters clear them away and leave us without any to use. It meant waking up early to book beach beds before breakfast and having to do some things ourselves and not depend on the staff. We probably looked ridiculous most times but at least we were no longer wallowing in our misery at the poor service of the hotel.
We were being proactive, eliminating our pain points and creating an environment where we could enjoy our vacation as a family.
It felt like more work than necessary. But you know what? We had a pretty damn good time.
By choosing to go with the flow, accepting the situation and making the best of it, our vacation didn’t turn out to be as disastrous as we had thought it would. The experience made me realize that things turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out.
In life, many such situations exist. We get inconvenienced, frustrated, disappointed, or we find out reality is different from what we expected. In such situations, we always have a choice. We can choose to make the negative experience our focus for the day, week, month…etc, and complain constantly and be moody. Or, we can choose our own happiness, turn the situation around, accept it and making the most of it all the same.
In other words, we need to ask ourselves: “Is it a bad day? Or is it a bad 5 minutes we want to milk all day?”
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I am The_Amuser and I am sharing musings about life through the eyes of a Kenyan college student on a tight budget :D
NOTE:
The services in Kenyan beach hotels are not as terrible as the experiences I described. Due to reasons best known to them, that particular hotel had issues it was going through, but I hear that they have now improved. Our service and hospitality industry, especially along the coast, is top notch and something to be experienced and I highly encourage it.
