The Australian Hospitality Handbook

By Peter Sheehan

People from all over the world assembled in Mother Earth's Down Under to produce a hospitality miracle - how they can get away with it! Being legally flexible of course!
Somebody-or-other Hilton - "Why, it's the Hilton handbook!"
The praise just keeps pouring in!
From the best-selling author of the highly unacclaimed trilogy, 'The Bible, The Koran and The Verbal Diarrhoea III'.
He is also responsible for those definitive travel books, 'The Environmentally Aware Person's Trekking Guides,' with such epic titles as 'Drunk and Disorderly in the Dardanelles', 'In the Lock-up Wherever the Stuff It Was', 'Chundering Around China', 'Achieving Stupor in Kathmandu' and 'Can't Remember California', among dozens of others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528972192

Peter Sheehan

Having joined the great flood from around the world to the Antipodes, found themselves to be an itinerant worker, predominantly in the fields of hospitality, public service, blues music and nuclear physics. Well, his many books are a lot more interesting than he is, anyway.

Book preview

Hotels

About the Author

Having joined the great flood from around the world to the Antipodes, found themselves to be an itinerant worker, predominantly in the fields of hospitality, public service, blues music and nuclear physics. Well, his many books are a lot more interesting than he is, anyway.

Dedication

This book, as usual, is dedicated to you. Who by, I have no idea, having only been guilty of writing it. You are patently far better known to you than I ever will have been, so it’s a case of, at the point of reading this, you being perfectly and famously well-known and me not. Whoever I’m supposed to be when I’m awake, that is – something vague enough to me at least 75% of the time.

All the same, hope you like it. You hope you do, that is. As you don’t even know or care that I exist, I won’t be nice at all and hope you like it, but acknowledge that you obviously hope to like it.

After all, you’re likely the only one here when this is being read, so you may as well hope that you thoroughly enjoy this book. And, if you do find it enjoyable, it serves you right. You go around reading this sort of thing, you deserve every bit of it. You certainly won’t get any sympathy at all from me, whoever the stuff I’m supposed to be, again.

So there.

PS The style of writing here is conversational and flexible to reinforce that this epic work is not a novel. It’s fairly consistent, though. Well, sometimes.

Travel definitely broadens the mind, but never as much as it renders others fantastically wealthy. The trick to success in hospitality is simple – the ability to fleece an ordinary idiot while convincing them that their social importance has been elevated to that of complete idiot (celebrity).

This book is designed for those engaged in the field and is composed of true stories, from various restaurants and tourist resorts around a little bit of the world, which demonstrate the finest points of the art of selling people hospitality, from a holiday to just a simple, take-away snack.

The names are all those of real people, so they can’t sue for defamation without admitting that it was them being described – which could get them at very least a lengthy term in either prison or a rubber room.

After all, the less the existence of knowledge, the more importance opinions take on, and any expression of an opinion nothing more than a blatant admission of ignorance.

One example of reality speaks louder than every opinion that will have ever existed.

This is why the foregoing uses real events and real people rather than anything even slightly artificial, to illustrate the Art of Hospitality in all its raging glory.

This author’s own experience as a cook, kitchen-hand, yards-man, gardener, housekeeper, public area cleaner and, in general, unemployable galoot at several dozen resorts, casinos, restaurants, hotels and bistros has given them a perfectly good perspective of the path to success in hospitality.

Success for whom, exactly, is another thing, so left to the reader to judge.

PS Whatever date this is supposed to be.

And where the hell am I again?

Copyright Information ©

Peter Sheehan (2020)

The right of Peter Sheehan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528947329 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528972192 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2020)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Chapter One

Home Away from Home

The right motel – modern (bland), clean, with a fridge and television in every apartment, as well as the essential ‘free’ Wi-Fi.

The right location – in a leafy cul-de-sac just a short walk from a sprawling ocean beach swooning in a pleasantly warm climate.

The right owner/managers – a young couple who had made it their passion to provide the best possible budget accommodation when they first started out in the business a year earlier. They were Jodi and Tim, with her providing the brains of the association and him the balance of the workforce, both still in their twenties when they took on the wonderful enterprise.

Jodi was profoundly proud of her pastoral origins: On our farm, we had two thousand sheep, and dad knew every one of them by name. He called them all ‘sheep’. Tim’s tending to the lawns and gardens was meticulous, though he never realised that the original owners had put in entirely plastic lawns and gardens. They were well watered and trimmed, anyway. Obviously, while the tininess of mind required to see the tiniest significance in trimmed plants in the first place would be a debilitating impairment to anyone requiring, in their chosen career, more mentality than a soiled nappy, fortunately, no such requirement exists for a career in hospitality management.

One important thing the two young managers did very correctly was ensuring never to drink on the job. It was not only a matter of refraining from going on like an idiot and talking inane crap. They were hospitality managers and didn’t need booze to go on like that. I do need to be drunk before I can go on like that, whatever you may think, but they, like us all, were reminded of the sad fate of the dinosaurs after those extraordinary creatures learned to distil cactus. Too great a lesson not to be taken to heart.

One blissful Sunday, and a dusty car pulls into the carpark, with a pile of luggage on the roof, a thirty-ish couple in the front seat and their pre-teenage son and daughter in the back.

Now, of great interest to motel staff worldwide, not to mention the psychiatric profession, is why the suburban tourist couple would go on a holiday and actually bring along their loud-mouthed, half-witted, out-of-control brats, getting away from which being the main reason the parents needed the holiday in the first place. Perhaps they had gotten afraid of what the beloved little loonies would get up to in the parents’ absence, or perhaps it’s simply to make the return to the rat-race seem like a great release.

Back to the motel and the newly arrived, much treasured, family of four. The car doors swung open slowly, advising the world of their royal suburban highnesses disembarkation. So precious is the guest. Well, to the guest, anyway.

Out they get, stretching and looking around before walking up toward the office. In a time honoured manner, Tim, watching their approach, made that statement that all motel workers make when experiencing the unbridled joy of seeing new guests, Oh, here we go, another load of tourist shit.

Jodi reacted with that great, though overwhelmingly futile, hope, Yeah, I wonder if we’ll ever get any normal people coming here.

Tim correctly surmised as he left to attend to the front gardens, At this rate, nope. He then pretended not to see the family as they passed up the path towards the office.

The family entered to see Jodi’s smiling countenance and warm welcome, Hi! Well, don’t you all look tired! Come a long way?

The father tourist replied in the affirmative and then proceeded to rant about how far he and his family had come, the towns they went through, the bad motels they stayed at, the weather, etc., etc., until Jodi could tell the fellow, by yelling over the top of the boring tripe he was talking, the price for a room. After the vital rigmarole of paying, getting a key, and being shown to their accommodation, of course, they just had to ask for assistance in bringing their luggage in. Jodi put the idea to Tim who was still setting sprinklers in the front gardens. He felt it only right to remind his angel of their motels rating, Christ, what do the shit-heads think this is? A fucking five-star resort? Fuck ’em, they can carry in their own bloody crap.

Jodi had the beautiful knack, from years of practice as an office worker, and in particular as a receptionist, of being able to speak with divine warmth and congeniality to someone’s face before preaching the most spectacular of criminal slander about