A few days ago I wrote of our adventure in San Antonio where the better half and I spent a couple of nights at a hotel which was, shall we say, a little less than ideal. I won’t go into details on this writing, as those details were covered in my previous post “Dirty is as Dirty Does.”

I left the audience hanging, saying that the corporate office had not been heard from at the time I wrote the piece.

Well, I wrote to corporate a second time on Thursday and got a reply early Friday.

I felt good about what they wrote. They essentially sent me a note saying that the site manager had agreed to refund what I paid for one night’s stay, providing I contact the site manager.

After chewing the message for a while, I decided that I had one of two ways to respond. One was to be a total “Karen” about the experience, the other was to take a kinder, gentler approach. Since the Karens I know are decent people, I opted for the gentler approach.

In the e-mail sent to the site manager, I quickly went over the lowlights of our visit before reminding the manager that it had been agreed that I was to be refunded one night’s stay for our trouble. I then suggested that if the refund had not been forwarded yet, for the manager to make a donation to the San Antonio Food Bank.

My e-mail was sent, with a copy sent to corporate so that they would know what was going on.

This morning, I opened my in box to find a “form letter” from someone in corporate, thanking me for voicing my concerns and for choosing a hotel in their chain – inviting me to come again.

The latest form letter from corporate reminded me of a story from back in the 1890s where someone wrote a letter to one of the railroads complaining about bedbugs in their sleeping car.

The railroad wrote back, thanking them for bringing the bedbug problem to their attention, further telling the customer that they could rest easy that due to their complaint, the company was taking action by fumigating their entire fleet of sleeper cars, and so on and so forth.

They attached a copy of the original complaint to their response, along with a notation on the complaint:

“SEND THEM THE BEDBUG LETTER”

Somehow it seems that the practice of sending form letters in response to complaints is still with us. Maybe the idea that impersonal responses to serious (or semi-serious) inquiries has been around longer than we thought.

The name of the chain has been withheld as a courtesy to the people who work there.

Be Seeing You!