By Jacco Zwetsloot
 |
I will deal with the third list first, because it was the shortest, with only 10 tasks. The hotel's Discover Seoul desk was staffed each day by two employees of Galaxyjin Tours and Seobu Car Rentals. At all times there was to be one staff member of from each firm standing at the desk, while the others worked in the back office.
We handled customer inquiries at the desk or by phone and when it was not busy, it was easy to hand off a question about renting a car to one of my Seobu colleagues and they would pass a tour-related inquiry on to me. If that Seobu staff member was temporarily away from the desk, or when there were too many customers at once, it fell to me to give basic information about renting and returning a car, or to give or receive a car key.
In theory, I might even have to take care of some of Seobu's administrative tasks, but thankfully it never came to that. Seobu was run by a Mr. Park, who rarely visited the hotel, so day-to-day it was managed by a Korean woman nicknamed Amanda. She mainly stayed in the back because, despite years of working at a hotel at the U.S. military garrison, she spoke almost no English. When agitated (or pretending to me, it was not always clear which was the case) she had a tendency to shout and speak in banmal, devoid of honorifics.
The first list comprised of 26 tasks for the hotel. When a person wanted to book a restaurant, buy a ticket for the Wine Festival or a New Year's Party, send or receive a fax, have their shoes shined, and so on, they would come to the Discover Seoul Desk.
Furthermore, our team acted as a sort of concierge service, helping guests find where to procure a babysitter, the best spot to buy sports clothing, or an art supply shop that stocked pipe cleaners (for some reason a memorable case), we were there to facilitate. If they wanted to know about the subway system, buy or recharge a T-money card, or get the schedule for the hop-on, hop-off Seoul City Tour Bus, we would do that. Any visit to the Discover Seoul desk gave Galaxyjin staff a chance to do some "upselling."
The reason Galaxyjin allowed its staff to perform unpaid tasks that only benefited the hotel or Seobu Rental Cars was as a loss-leader to try to sell tours or other ticket products. Almost anyone who came to us for any reason was offered a red "Seoul City Tours" booklet to see what packages we offered. We had to know the contents of that booklet, including tour itineraries and prices, back to front and inside out.
The second list, from my actual employer Galaxyjin Travel, felt like it was constantly increasing its 34 specified tasks. The basic job, of course, was selling tours and tickets (to Nanta and other performances), but there was so much more on top of that.
Beside the Discover Seoul Desk was a little alcove that held a computer, where we created an Excel spreadsheet every day, showing every tour, booking and cancellation that we made. Each evening we had to send one version to the marketing director of the hotel to show how much we had made on that day. This number would determine the monthly commission or concession that the tour company had to pay to the hotel. We sent another version of the file, more accurate and with more detail, to the tour firm headquarters.
As Discover Seoul Desk manager I had to train team members, oversee the functioning of the team, create marketing campaigns for new or special tours, raise productivity and standards, take responsibility for communications, report to the hotel and the travel company, and create the monthly work schedule of the Galaxyjin team staff who worked the desk.
Because a hotel is open seven days a week, 365 days a year, people who work there cannot just work Monday to Friday and take weekends off. So at the end of each month came the duty of rationing Saturday and Sundays and public holidays, trying to satisfy everyone's special requests to have this or that day off, but inevitably making someone unhappy.
Most of the time, the tasks of the Discover Seoul Desk were compatible, but sometimes they clashed. And this was further compounded by the difficulties of working for one company, while effectively having three bosses. Four, actually.
