Accor Reviews

Hotel discounts and unlimited training

When you first walk in, everything - the perpetually dimmed light, the concrete walls and ceilings - begins to press down on you, until you feel very small and very weak. At first you can't place the feeling. Then you look up and see it bearing down on you: the enormous ego of a person who came to be called your manager not through competence, but through sheer appetite for the title. A person so afraid to admit her own insignificance that she arrives at the most efficient solution available - affirming herself through the humiliation of the people beneath her. And that, fundamentally, is all she is able to see in some of the most multi-skilled, sharp, and well-rounded people I have ever had the chance to work alongside. Perhaps an overly dramatic opening. But yes - as everyone there liked to remind me, I was once "lucky" enough to land at a property in the MGallery collection. On reception. From day one, it was made clear that nothing would be repeated to you a second time without a grimace and irritation on their face, and that to not merely be on the team but to belong to it, I would just have had to be born slightly differently. I'm normally fairly relaxed and open, but here I simply felt unable to speak to anyone - especially after the kind of moment where you sit down across from a colleague in the canteen and they rise and leave in silence the instant you try to ask them something. Or where, out of tension, you touch your hair a little too often and get your hand slapped for it, because there is a Guest in front of you.