Those "Rude

And Unpleasa "

P-Ng Hotels

By James Anderson

Do all the hotel people in Papua-New Guinea have a chip on their shoulder—a “step-on

them before-they-step-on-you”

attitude to business?

I don’t know, but after a recent territory business tour during which I stayed at many hotels, perhaps I might be forgiven for thinking so.

Frankly, I found a lot of unpleasant ness and rudeness in the territory hotel business. I didn’t like it, and 1 think it’s time the territory hotel industry took stock of itself.

Let me start at the beginning and tell you of some of my experiences.

My first port of call was Port Moresby, where I arrived by air at 2 a.m. from Brisbane and looked forward to a sleep for the rest of the night at accommodation I had booked through Ansett Airways in Sydney three months before.

I was met by a gentleman waving a flashlight, who said, “Who are you and what do you want?” I told him.

He replied that if I hadn’t sent him the money for the room then I didn’t have a room. He couldn’t hold rooms for people who made reserva tions through the airlines instead of sending a deposit, he said.

It was now 4 a.m. I asked if I could sleep on the verandah until daylight and then sort things out and was told no. Not knowing where to go, I sat in front of the hotel for about an hour until a woman came out and said, “You can come in now, Mr. Anderson. We’ve found your reservation”.

I was shown to my room.

Later that morning I left the hotel, although I had booked in for two nights, and was roundly lectured by the lady for this.

What a beginning! I didn’t expect to find first-class service and accom modation in New Guinea, and would not have been upset about the mix up in the reservations had I been treated with more courtesy.

Later, all through the territory I heard complaints from hotel owners about the difficulty of getting staff, equipment and furnishings, of high costs and the never-ending problems associated with native labour.

But politeness costs nothing, and if some of the European staffs I met in territory hotels were only half as considerate as many of their native staff, the territory would be a better place to holiday in.

There was an instance at one hotel, where I tried to order a middy of beer from a woman behind the bar, and had to repeat myself several times, finally explaining that I wanted “a small glass of beer”.

“Well, my gosh,” she said. “Why didn’t you say so. I thought you were talking about a bloody auto mobile or something!”

Worse to come I could only assume that she couldn’t understand my American accent, but worse was to come. After serving me with my beer (a middy, by the way, is an Australian measure of beer), she joked with the barman in a very loud voice about how some people “never learn to speak English”.

At the reception desk at the same hotel I asked if the receptionist would call me a cab. She said, “There’s the phone. You can call one yourself”. But as I reached for the phone she put her hand on it, and said, “That will be sixpence please ”.

At a hotel in the Sepik district I got into trouble because I helped myself to some ice for my drink from an ice-bucket on the bar. The native drink waiter was serving somebody else.

The manager, sitting at the other end of the bar, called out to me, “Hey you! We have service here!”

I felt like replying, “Where the hell is it?” But this being the only hotel in that area, I smiled, gritted my teeth and said, “sorry”.

I could give you more examples in different places, but why bother.

It’s the general atmosphere that counts. And the general atmosphere is: “If you don’t like it you can sleep under the nearest coconut palm, because we hotel people really couldn’t care less”.

As a visitor, the general lack of courtesy made me mad.