A comparison....Mother's Day buffet at home..

[Mackey Mouse]

I was thinking, should I post this, it is not really Disney, but I wanted you to have a comparison on a brunch buffet that we went to in Boston yesterday. It was at the Intercontinental for Mother's day.. I have to say the food was incredible... crab legs, shrimp all you could eat on both.. salads, nicoise, caesar, asparagus goat cheese tarts... omelette stations, crepe stations, and a dessert table that could knock anyone off their diet.. Roast beef, beef wellington, poached fish, risotto, it was a very good buffet... also you could order one ala carte item... i.e. eggs benedict, french toast made with brioche, smokes salmon.. special omelettes.. it was an excellent buffet, pricey but excellent.

Also, with the very pricey, the 18% was added in as the gratuity... here is where it fell short...the service was not good. We had to ask for more coffee, never did our waters get refilled, we had to ask for people to take away our plates...we were served coffee and with our desserts, we had no spoons, had to ask for them too. I am not sure what was going on... there were so many servers working the day, but somehow they were not serving our table.. Maybe because we were a bigger party??? 7 and 1 little one.. who knows.

I may write a letter to the hotel because this hotel is usually excellent, the food always good, but they were definitely overwhelmed in the service department... and the 18% was added on. My husband who never says anything to me said that was a very pricey bill and they got a lot of money for a tip and did not really take care of our table..

Just an FYi and a comparision...

 

[wdwrich]

I totally understand. We've had the good, the bad, and the ugly in restaurants at WDW as well as at home and elsewhere. When an automatic gratuity is added to the bill and we feel it wasn't justified or earned, we usually speak to the manager about it. Sometimes they change it- sometimes not. Conversely, when we get excellent service or food (or both), we also seek out the manager to let him/her know how pleased we were.

 

[disnut8]

It doesn't matter if your party is 8 or 2 or 18, you should never have to put up with bad "service".

Unfortunately, the time to really make an impression to the management about your experience has passed. It really should have been done immediately. The servers and management continued for the rest of the special day thinking they were doing just fine.

Write the letter but I have a feeling the management is just going to see it as someone who had a bad day and didn't get what she wanted on Mother's Day.

I hope your day was fine without the bad service.

 

[Mackey Mouse]

Just wanted to make sure I let you all know.. the food was excellent, excellent time with my family and I certainly had the most wonderful day with them all... just wanted to say that about the tip on the buffet and the servers... for a basis of comparison. I could not fault them on their food....just 18% for a tip when basically we waited on ourselves or if we needed something we had to go find it. I may or may not write the letter and I do agree the time to say something is when you are there, but the day was wonderful so I really did not want to get into it... if that makes sense??

 

[Todd&Copper]

My family went out to a Thanksgiving buffet a few years ago (not Disney) and the restaurant put an automatic 18% gratuity on all check, presumably for the holiday. Well, we had terrible service. We had stacks of dirty plates on our table for far too long (and we eventually moved them over to a servcie tray ourselves), my iced tea was never refilled, and the only time we saw the waitress was when she showed us to our table. There were probably only about 30 or so tables in the place to begin with. My dad was not ahppy at all with the forced gratuity (one that he felt was COMPLETELY unearned), so he had the bill adjusted to only the total for the meal and we left a couple of dollars on the table for the crappy service. The manager tried to ask us how much we wanted to give instead, 15% perhaps? Uh, no. Just charge me for the food and I'll make the determination as to how worthy the service was.
If service had been good, I am sure Dad wouldn't have had a problem with the gratuity (and he may have left more b/c he tends to be a big tipper), but when the five or six 20-somethings who are supposed to be clearing dirties and refilling drinks are just standing around doing nothing, they so don't deserve a tip.