How To Work At A Hotel

grouplifeguy | Dec 15, 2009 |

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As someone who travels about two thirds of the year, I spend a lot of my time in hotels. During that time, I've learned how to work at a hotel. Not as an employee but as a place to get work done. For me the hardest part about working on the road is getting comfortable there. I have had basic rooms to five star rooms with printers and fax machines in the room which is pretty cool.

A lot of times, I have a hard time getting work done in the room. And, I don't really like to work in a cramped business center. Many hotels I stay in are in small towns, so they don't have an extensive business center to work from. What I like to do then is work in the breakfast area. There are usually many tables that I can put all my work on and kind of spread out a little bit. Plus, during the day and a night, it's usually pretty quiet and I can focus on the work at hand. The other thing that makes it convenient is I can many times pull the car to the front of the hotel and make sure that I have everything pretty handy.

I can tell you from experience that the biggest problem with working on the go, is that the hotel's printer never works, is out of toner or paper. In addition, if you are short on time, there is always someone using the sole computer available.

What I do then is always make sure that I have my notebook handy and I have set up a virtual fax number that I can use via email. If I need to print a document, I can email it through the vitrual fax service to the hotel fax machine. This works great for a fax of a few pages and I've yet to be told the fax doesn't work. Otherwise, if you have a bigger print job, you are better off going to a print center.

As I've gotten older, I find it a little harder to get comfortable in the room to work. Fortunately, most of the places I stay now are set up to handle the business traveler. It does happen occasionally that electrical outlets are no where near the table I might work from but not as often as it used to. The main problem these days is having enough internet bandwidth for everyone in the hotel. But, that's a pet peeve for another day.