A hotel staffer begged me for a good review. Her job was on the line

“Could I please ask you to do something?” the woman says, her manner suddenly awkward. We nod. “Could you write a good review for my service?”

Her service is to deliver food to our room at a hotel in Singapore. We’ve only just arrived from a long flight an hour or so ago, our kids are starting to go bug-eyed crazy, we’ve settled into the room and decided to just order room service for dinner instead of dragging everyone out again.

Hotels and cruise ships shouldn’t be forcing staff to compete with each other.Credit: iStock

It’s a good plan. It’s all going well when the food arrives quickly and the server removes the cloches with a flourish to reveal a feast of Singaporean favourites: satays, wonton mee, rendang and rice.

She’s kind to our kids, polite and friendly to us. And then she goes to leave, and makes her awkward request. “Can you write a good review?”

It turns out the hotel has hired a group of trainees. Of those trainees, according to the woman in our room right now, only those with the best customer feedback will be given a job. The rest will be let go.

Write me a good review, she’s asking us, or I could lose my job.

What in the Hunger Games is going on here? What is a hotel thinking, sending potential employees out onto a live training ground, forcing them to battle each other for good reviews? Why would the company drive these people into a situation where of course they will have to ask guests to be kind to them, where they will have to essentially beg for their jobs?

This practice is bizarre but it’s not all that unusual now, at least in my experience. I was on a cruise earlier this year, again with my family, and the wait staff in the restaurants on board practically begged us to review them, and to do so favourably.

“I expect to see ‘excellent’ ratings across the board,” one said with see-through confidence. “If there is anything right now that is not excellent, please tell me so I can fix it.”

“Make sure you review me,” another said. “And it has to be ‘excellent’. OK?”

“Family,” another said through a wide, fake smile, “don’t forget to fill out your feedback forms, and remember to give us perfect reviews.”

I’m not here to make Hunger Games-style decisions on who gets to keep their livelihood and feed their family, and who has to go home and tell their kids they don’t have a job any more.

We had plenty of time on that ship to ponder the obsession with stellar feedback. Were the staff all pitted against each other? Would the losers be thrown overboard? Were there bonuses available to those with the best reviews? Or – our wildest guess – were people’s families being held captive and only released upon receiving an “excellent”?

As a customer, as a traveller, you can only hazard a guess. And then you can decide whether you go ahead and give the review that is being so desperately sought, whether you’re honest about the good service you’ve received, or whether you’re even more honest about the awkwardness and the guilt being foisted on the customer by a company and a system that demands positive feedback or else.

Because none of this is the fault of the employees. The fault lies entirely with companies that are clearly either dangling perks or threatening consequences if glowing feedback is not received.

There’s something horribly dystopian to the realisation that some blameless employee’s future lies in your hands, that some company is brutal enough to be trusting its staff’s livelihoods and their fates to the fickle general public.

I don’t want to do this when I travel. I don’t want to see fear in people’s eyes, people who are far less privileged than I am, when they’re just doing something as straightforward as bringing over a plate of food.

Companies – hotels, cruise lines, maybe even airlines – might think they’re encouraging good performance but what they’re really doing is creating a system in which staff have to beg their customers for positive feedback.

That’s incredibly demeaning for those in a service role that already demands obsequiousness. It’s also awkward for guests who have the full brutality of their servers’ tenuous working conditions revealed to them.

Of course, this modern world has an insatiable appetite for customer feedback. Your travel insurance company wants a review of their service when all you’ve done is buy a policy online. Your booking app wants to know how you enjoyed that restaurant you visited. The toilets at the airport want to know if the experience met your expectations.

So, obviously the hotel wants reviews of its staff, and the cruise company wants to know how its food servers are performing. But frankly that’s not my job. I’m not here – and I assume you’re not here – to constantly review every element of the travel experience (unless, you know, a newspaper is paying me for it).

I’m also not here to make Hunger Games-style decisions on who gets to keep their livelihood and feed their family, and who has to go home and tell their kids they don’t have a job any more.

So if I could please ask travel companies a favour? Make this stop.

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