Monday April 23, 2018, Part 2
Upon our return to the room, we noticed that housekeeping was in the vicinity. And by that I mean we made eye contact with her as we put our “room occupied” sign on the door. Our room hadn’t been touched yet, which we totally understood, since it was early in the day, and we didn’t need more towels or pillows anyway. When we arrived, there had been 6 pillows in our room. Somehow when we returned to the room on Sunday, that number had multiplied to 8. Now, I know the second bed is a murphy bed, and we also each sleep with 2 pillows, but we had pillows stashed in every available corner of the room at that point.
But, for those who have smartly avoided a certain popular Disney drama...err...discussion board, and who have not been to Disney lately, Disney has changed their policies a bit. It used to be that if you hung the “do not disturb” sign on your door, housekeeping wouldn’t even knock. They might leave you a bag of toiletries, towel, and paper products (says the girl who once ended up with 3 of those bags...on a SOLO trip and could have taken about 16 showers without ever using the same towel twice), hanging from your door, and then they went away.
This isn’t the case anymore. The “do not disturb” signs have been switched out for “room occupied” signs, and housekeeping must enter each room at least once a day, as a deterrent, I guess against another Las Vegas style incident.
I’ve seen mixed reviews on this policy, and wasn’t anxious to see it unfold. But I was hoping they’d take the sign and our eye contact into account, so we could have that peaceful nap break in air conditioning.
To make a long story very short, my hopes remained wishes. It started reasonably enough with just a knock on the door, but over the course of approximately an hour we (I...Nick slept through it) were disrupted approximately half a dozen times by housekeeping. This included one housekeeper barging in (followed by others knocking just moments later, so clearly they weren’t communicating), and finished with the housekeeping manager paying us a visit to find out why we were refusing service (hi...my husband is SLEEPING) and swiping his key to prove he’d been there. Our “room occupied” door hanger also disappeared sometime in this door knocking process. And it wasn’t windy yet.
For future reference, per the email I received from Disney in response to mine, guests are able to schedule these “inspections” (their words, not mine). Since they’re carried out by housekeeping, I assume this means calling housekeeping upon arrival and telling them when you’d like your room cleaned. I’m very rarely a complaining guest (and even with this email, I tried to keep it to simply urging Disney to continue to evaluate their procedures). Both Nick and I have logged countless hours in customer service jobs, so we try to keep complaints to companies at a minimum. But I will be scheduling housekeeping moving forward, because half a dozen disruptions in an hour is not acceptable.
So...shortly before the housekeeping manager showed up, I got a text from Kim wondering where we were. When I told her Nick was sleeping and I was just hanging around, she suggested we walk to the pool to put our feet in. Ok!
The computer pool was very close to our room, so we headed over there. I think we had our feet in the pool for no more than 5 minutes before the lifeguard started clearing the pool. Incoming storm!
We walked back to the rooms, and decided since both boys were conducting an orchestra in snore-major, to pull chairs out of our rooms and sit outside between the two rooms, under cover. It was as we were pulling chairs outside that the previously mentioned housekeeping manager showed up.
Kim and I sat outside chatting for probably an hour, during which time it poured very briefly, before she decided to rest for 20 minutes before we left for the Animal Kingdom.
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