Jae Knowlton is the Operations Manager for Starwood's Austin Customer Contact Center and thelobby.com's expert on family travel and hospitality.
I was attending Westin Service Culture training at the Westin Galleria (pictured) in Houston. I was one of only 2 attendees who was not an employee of the hotel but everyone made me feel like a part of the team. My wife & kids came with me for the trip because we have family on my wife’s side in Houston. It’s a bit of a trek to get bags from the parking garage to the guest room, and as we were settling into our room we discovered that Kasey’s little bag with her MP3 player was missing. We retraced our steps from the room to the car and back but couldn’t find it. We called lost and found for the hotel and the mall but it never turned up. Somehow this reached the ears of the hotel’s GM, Beth Thomas, who presented me with a brand new MP3 player before we left. There was absolutely no reason to do this other than to demonstrate her and Westin’s values in a very tangible way.
