A while ago my husband got a job. Something of an accomplishment here in Mexico where it is legal to discriminate based on age, sex, marital status, height, you name it. He is in his 40's. Ninety percent of the help-wanted ads specify someone under 35.
So he got this job working for the Palace Resorts. The Resort was south of Cancun down near Puerto Aventuras, which is 70 miles away or so. The Resort provides bus transportation to and from Cancun for it's employees. This is nice, but since they do not pay their employees enough to afford to buy cars they have no choice but to "be nice" and provide transportation.
During his orientation he was given a copy of the company rule book. The rules state clearly that he was not allowed to bring a walkman on the bus (or use a cell phone or wear sunglasses), so he's got a 2.5 hour per day round trip commute and he can't listen to a radio. He tried reading on the bus but the shocks were so bad that he quickly got a headache. Everyone else on the bus just slept the whole time. He soon understood why. They were being worked to exhaustion, they needed the extra sleep.
A normal workweek for employees of Palace Resorts is 6 days a week and 10-12 hours a day. Add on 15 hours a week of commute time and you've got 80 hours into your job there. And you can't afford a car on what they pay you for those 80 hours.
In Mexico the minimum salary for an employee is under $200 usd per month. Many of the jobs at the Palace Resorts pay the minimum salary plus tips or commissions.
The first day my husband came home and said "No one there is working from their heart, no one." The people he met working there were so desperate and poor and overworked that they could only look out for themselves, service to the client was secondary.
His job was to sell tour packages to the guests of the Resort, he was also supposed to help people who already had tours booked with their reservations. When they hired him they explained that he would get a commission on each tour sold (they also said his shifts would be 6 hours long, not the 12 that they turned out to be). They did not explain that fully 50% of the people who he would be helping already had tours included in their stay package. So he expected to make a commission of most people at the Resort but instead only about half the people arrived at the Resort without a pre-booked tour.
The job involved confirming and booking tours. If someone had a tour included with their room then my husband needed to help them make an actual reservation. My husband quickly learned from the other sales reps that he shouldn't waste a single minute on the people he couldn't make a commission off of. When the guests were in line to check reservations or buy tours the reps could tell from their bracelet colors and the papers they held what their status with the hotel was, anyone with "tours included" was gotten rid of as quickly as possible.
The process of booking or confirming a reservation was a lengthy one. It involved trying to call numbers where overworked people were too busy to pick up the phone. It involved trying to use an antiquated online booking system which wouldn't stay up. Often the reps would tell the guests who had tours included that the tours were full for that day, without looking it up, just to get rid of them.
The Palace Resorts does what many big hotels around here do, they sell timeshares. They call it something else and they dress it up but it's the same concept. They call it membership. The people who buy the highest level membership, the Premiere Membership, are supposed to receive the best service from the Resort. All the golf they want, all their tours included, all inclusive. The Premiere members wear a specific color bracelet. To all the sales reps selling tours anyone with a Premiere Membership bracelet on must be gotten rid of as quickly as possible because there was no money to be made off them. According to my husband the people with the highest level memberships got the worst service! I'll bet they didn't explain the pitfalls of Premiere Membership during the timeshare sales process!
The tours themselves are to all of the cool spots around here, the ancient Mayan ruins at Tulum, Coba and Chichen Itza. There are tours which take people to swim with dolphins, go parasailing, deep sea fishing and there are tours which go to the eco-parks at Xcaret and Xel-ha.
Tulum is a small set of Mayan ruins and they are right on top of a cliff overlooking the beautiful Caribbean Sea. The beach there is one of the nicest in the world! When locals go to Tulum they don't consider going without a bathing suit. When Palace Resorts tour groups go there they are not given any time to enjoy the beach, they get off the bus, they have a guided tour and they get back on the bus. When my husband worked there he repeatedly heard the sales reps tell the guests that "it is not advisable to swim at Tulum, too many rocks". There are rocks but they are not IN the water, they are in the cliff. At the bottom of the cliff is just a pure white-sand beach lapped by the lovely Caribbean.
The guests of the Palace Resort at Puerto Aventuras often complain that the beach isn't very nice at the Resort. It's rocky and there's not much sand. But if you take the tour to Tulum you don't want to swim because there are rocks!
After nearly a month of learning the secrets of the sales reps my husband was exhausted. He earned something around $180 usd total for his time there. He didn't make any commissions because he quit just at the end of his training period. He decided that being trained to get rid of people as fast as possible while providing little to no service was not worth 80 hours a week of his life.
