DOING EMOTIONAL LABOUR: DEALING WITH IRATE AND MESSY GUESTS The reception section had to deal with multifarious demands and queries by guests: ‘the front desk is more pressured [than switchboard], they get millions of questions’ (Guest Services Manager). This constant questioning regularly involved being on the receiving end of complaints, or as one woman who had transferred into the front desk from another department described it, ‘when you’re actually at the front desk, you get it’ (FDA1).5 As Faulkner and Patiar (1997, p. 104) have commented, ‘whatever the cause of the guests’ dissatisfaction, it is the front office staff who are required to deal with them face to face and resolve the problem’. Resolving guests’ problems involved having to manage both the guests’ and their own feelings and in so doing undertake emotional labour, along the lines indicated by Hochschild (1983), in which smiling through adversity was an expected part of the job. Dealing with ‘lots of complaints’ and the complex negotiating skills involved in doing so was described at length by one of the women front desk agents:
That’s one of the things that’s tiring. I have to sit there and smile and be happy and be jolly for eight hours a day. And then have somebody come and like scream 51 Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society – Volume 10 – Spring 2007 in my face or like, getting all upset. We’re obviously here before the restaurant, here is where the housekeeping [unclear], we’re always here and then we have to figure out what does this guest want, all those things. […] You can’t freak out at people, it’s not appropriate, you know. Generally people will start out all heated and then you kind of just like, you know, ‘I’m listening to you, it’s OK, we’ll figure it out together’, that sort of thing. […] But it’s hard sometimes when someone’s like screaming at you for something that’s