AIBU to think Premier Inn should’ve let homeless in.

[Oddish]

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/premier-inn-homeless-people-turned-away-customer-paying-westonsupermare-a8240171.html

A woman who couldn’t make her mass booking of 19 rooms due to the weather last week offered the rooms to the homeless in the area via a charity’s Facebook.
A couple who had a flooded home were also given a room.
Flood couple let in no problem, homeless people who attended with charity rep were turned away.
Now Premier are saying they needed the lead room booker to be there and ID to be presented which is obviously bollocks because the flooded home couple were allowed in with no problem.

AIBU to think they should’ve let them in, it was bitterly cold and I think they acted heartlessly. Then the backtracking that followed. AIBU to boycott them? Would you?

My partner has worked professionally in homeless support services for many years. I don't think you would find anyone who works in the field and deeply understands the issues who would condone 19 homeless people being put up for one night in a hotel with no support.
The support services my partner works with definitely do not see homeless people as scum. Quite the opposite. They are treated very much as individuals with their own needs and views and the support workers have a thorough understanding of them as real people.
As numerous other posters have said, before me, street homeless people almost always have complex and intractable problems and chaotic lifestyles that are not going to be helped in any way by them spending one night in unsuitable accommodation.
Sorry op, it's great that you feel so passionate about this and that you volunteer with homeless charities at Christmas etc but it may be worth looking a little deeper into the issues and maybe you will understand that your (very common, sweet and naive) view of homelessness is sadly not very practical or useful in real life situations.

It is ridiculous to expect PI to house homeless people. It is not right to expect a few untrained staff to manage and then the mattresses and bed linen might be left with lice, cigarette burns etc. The rough sleepers will be sleeping in very dirty clothes.
I have every sympathy for the homeless and donate every month to a homeless charity but you can't shift the responsibility for looking after them into a hotel chain. If you'd be willing to clean up after them then take them to your house.

I agree with what PI did. The person who made the booking should have checked with them first.If they had said yes, then the person who originally booked would have had to sign something to the effect that whatever damage was caused would be paid by they themselves out of their own pocket.
I bet they wouldn't have signed!
Homelessness is not simple. Plenty of people are out on the streets because they are dangerous to themselves and others and frankly, no one wants them in their home.
We have one guy in our village. People always giving him money and last week they were worried about him.
Turns out that he has plenty of relatives in the village, but they have all kicked him out as he beat up his 90 year old mum and damaged other relatives properties.
So for now, he lives in a heated tent in church grounds. Last week he was loaned a caravan.
But his relatives loathe him!

I think they made the right decision under the circumstances.

Sorry OP. I agree with PI. They're running a business not a charity and they have to consider the safety of the other guests and their staff. They aren't qualified to do deal with addictions, MH issues. I agree there should be more support put in place to help the homeless though.

If I was staying in PI and this happened, I would feel very unsafe staying there and a lot of guests would also have felt unsafe and would have felt or been threatened, especially if a homeless guest asked them for money for their booze and a guest had refused to give them any.

The "Good Samaritan" could well have guaranteed the hotel - but given the mess that 19 people could have made across all those rooms, how would PI know she was good for the money? That could have included damage to property; theft; people and possibly claims for refunds from other guests if there was noise/mess... the claim could have been huge. Her offer could have been completely hollow.

And you can bet that letting unknown people without ID stay would mean their insurer wouldn't pay for it either. Insurers aren't usually known for their humanitarian skills!

Bastards!

dought

Who? The homeless, the charity workers on here who completely support the actions of the premier inn or the untrained and clearly at risk hotel staff and guests?

It's a tad unreasonable on the whole to refuse entry to any guests if the hotel didn't do enough about helping them acquire an alternative (as you would expect in such a situation if you were a tourist).

The debate about whether homeless people should be allowed into hotels is a moot point - where are they supposed to go? I wouldn`t classify Premier Inn as a place with a "dress code" either.

I guess I am wondering whether it was the sheer number of homeless people that were the problem, which I would presume would have been more than 18 people. A handful would not be a problem maybe?

What others have said about damage, and so on.

And more to the point (and the related story of their refusal to give a discount to stranded NHS staff), just how much discretion does the OP think staff at a Premier Inn checkin have? They're on minimum wage, working unsocial hours, and they are the small human face of an organisation that offers cheap-ish, decent-ish rooms is good-ish locations by relentlessly squeezing cost out of the business.

Premier Inn want ID on checkin partly because of damage, and partly because they don't want a shadow market to grow up of people booking rooms far in advance and then re-selling them at a profit later. It's the same as Easy/Ryan/etc on cheap plane fares: they want to be able to price-discriminate between people who can book far in advance and people who are willing to pay for flexible bookings. You might disagree with that business model, and it's your right to disagree (although the desperate financial straits of independent hotel owners says not many people actually do).

Asking staff to on their own initiative override several parts of the checkin process and give keys to people who are homeless is charming, until you think it through: anything that goes wrong will be the responsibility of minimum wage staff, who will probably lose their jobs. And there is lots that can go wrong, not least "AIBU: I took my small children to a Premier Inn so we could visit their elderly grandmother in hospital, and we were upset when a drunken man started hammering on our door at 3am". Yes, that can happen in Premier Inns and even more in Travel Lodges and is not totally unknown in the Hotel Posho-Expenseaccountonlyo, but hotels try to avoid it when they can.

Since they have the choice between "three grand and no risk" and "three grand and a lot of risk", then even if they had the discretion, which they don't, why would they take the risk?

Ditto "discounts for stranded NHS workers". Do you think minimum wage checkin staff can give discounts on room rates on their own initiative? Without a massive inquest afterwards? Front of House staff giving mates' rates is a huge problem for the hospitality trade, and a lot of the processes you see around food orders, say, are designed to deal with that.

nousernameforme if you are referring to a particular drinking establishment on Regent Street, police called 5 times is a fairly normal Friday or Saturday night!

As PP have said, the PI staff aren't trained to deal with this. It shouldn't have come to this issue in the first place. If good/safe accommodation were available for anyone in need then it wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

Also Oddish, have a read of this:

www.antislavery.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/uk/trafficking-crime-begging/

When you give money to a homeless person you may well be facilitating their enslavement and funding the trafficking of more human beings into slavery.

It would have had a totally different outcome if op had offered those rooms to members of the emergency services who couldn't get home after a shit shift.

I know op didn't have the rooms to give away, meant to say if original payer.....

weeds is that a place beginning with a Q or a W?

Ms Parker-Khan had no authority to offer those rooms to anyone other than those named in the booking. No matter if they be vagrants or nuns. And the reception staff had no authority to admit anyone else either. How much clearer can that be made? Ms P-K should have rescheduled her booking to another time, not try to play Lady Bountiful with property that isn't hers. Offering the rooms on Facebook, ffs. She must be one seriously dopey individual to even begin to think that that would be okay.

OP
Please look at this
thamesreach.org.uk/what-we-do/campaigns/killing-with-kindness/giving-money-people-begging-frequently-asked-questions/

I was thinking of DK eltonjohn

Mrs P K

Dopey , virtue signalling at its most distasteful, stupid and possibly all staged.

It seems the same sort of "gesture" made by people who don't get planning permission for their field or whatever so then offer to let travellers stay on it. Clearly only good intentions...

If I stay in a hotel alone, I am always careful about security. In fact I have been very impressed with both PI and TL: when giving you your room number they write it down and pass it across the desk so no one loitering nearby can hear, and each corridor can only be key accessed by those staying on it. A hotel is a hotel, not a homeless shelter with its attendant challenges. As others have noted - never mind the guests - it would have been absolutely unreasonable for the staff and cleaners to have to cope with 19 homeless men.

No snow but I could easily be in the place of one of the people wanting a bed on the coldest nights of the year. Almost anyone could.

This is commonly said, but no, you couldn't, and it's the sort of "think of the starving children in Africa and eat your dinner" thinking that makes people shrug their shoulders.

For most people posting on MN on a Tuesday afternoon, it would take an almost unimaginable sequence of events for them to end up on the streets. That is not to say it is impossible, but the chances are incredibly small. People end up homeless if a few things go wrong, but only if they are coming from an already very precarious starting position. Otherwise you have the family, friends, colleagues, money, credit cards, access to services, literacy and articulacy which means you will not end up on the streets. It is vital we put in place services to prevent and mitigate people ending up on the streets, but "oh, it could happen to anyone at a moment's notice" flatly isn't true. There will be people for whom it is true, yes, but they're not posting here. And saying it trivialises the problem.

For posters here who disagree, think of the chain of events which puts you on the streets. How likely is each step in that chain? Multiply those likelihoods together. It will be vanishingly small. For example, if you reckon three things each of which is a 1% chance have to happen, then it's a 0.00001% chance. That's about the risk of your dying in a car accident on your way home tonight, or the risk that the next plane flight you take results in your death. And for most of us, the chance of being homeless is substantially less than that, as it would take more than three very unlikely things (losing my house, losing all my friends, losing all my family, losing all my money, losing all my access to credit, becoming severely mentally ill and/or addicted - none of those are impossible, but they're all risks at the 1% level, so the risk of all of them happening together aren't worth worrying about.

People end up homeless if a few things go wrong, but only if they are coming from an already very precarious starting position. Otherwise you have the family, friends, colleagues, money, credit cards, access to services, literacy and articulacy which means you will not end up on the streets.

It just isn't true that people who end up homeless are exclusively those without family, friends, colleagues, money, credit cards, access to services, literacy and articulacy.

Very well said Cuboidalslipshoddy

'It's a tad unreasonable on the whole to refuse entry to any guests if the hotel didn't do enough about helping them acquire an alternative (as you would expect in such a situation if you were a tourist).'

But they are not guest, the original booker is. The rooms are not her property to dispose of how she wishes anymore than say, a seat you buy on an airplane is - the airline has to agree to the change to the ticketed passenger (usually for a fee) because you are not buying the actual seat but the space it occupies on an aircraft, a piece of property, that is not yours. As for finding them an alternative, get real! Their hotel employees, not homeless shelter workers.