Importance and the lack of it!

We had a tough day yesterday. The sun can make a lot of normally good people, very irritable and unreasonable. In fact, I’m beginning to think that the newly refurbished Paphos Airport arrivals hall, has a bucket at the exit to taxis, which has a sign over it saying, “Leave your brains, good manners and sense of humour here”!

There is something about working in the tourism industry which makes some people believe you are lower than the low: sort of their “paid slaves”, if you like.

Let me give you some examples:

Checking families in to a gorgeous villa in Coral Bay, having gone through the checkin details etc, they asked us, “When do you come to take our shopping orders?”……..er, we don’t. Villas are self catering.

Another asked, “When do you come in to cook?”. Thankfully, she was joking – I think!

In Peyia yesterday, a long term rental client came running into our office shouting that she didn’t like the pool safely signs and wanted them taken down because they made her home feel like a holiday complex! Okay……

The most regular is, we need more towels because we don’t want to wash any…..yet we change them once per week and leave plenty for the week. Its great fun.

I was reading something about a large queue at an airport checkin where the customers had had a long wait and one man in particular was getting very angry about waiting. He stormed to the front of the queue and said to the rep, through gritted teeth, “do you know who I am?”. Without hesitation, the checkin rep opened her tannoy and said loudly to the waiting queue, “Does anyone recognise the man at the front of this checkin desk? He seems to have forgotten his name”…..

How absolutely wonderful!

There are days I bite my tongue but that doesn’t stop me thinking of what I’d really like to say. My fear is that one of these days, I’ll say out loud what I sometimes think – and that could cause a problem!!

Mind you, as a great lady villa owner once told me, “People seem to think you come with the price of their holiday” – that they can be rude/abusive and bad mannered because they’ve paid you for their holiday.

Thankfully, these people are few and far between…….

Tony and I are taking a holiday in September……….wonder if the years of a few memories of awkward villa guests will overflow. I mean, will they KNOW who we are?! (And will they care? Maybe a little bit: just a little of how much we care for our guests will do – but we know how hard their job is, so we’ll be dream guests.

Perhaps!)