Objection To Remarks About Receptionists

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31092, 22 June 1966, Page 14

Objection To Remarks About Receptionists

(From Our Own Reporter) TIMARU, June 21. Exception to remarks by a delegate attending the community public relations officers’ conference at Timaru—the delegate’s “pet aversion” is the hotel receptionist with the “perfectly correct attitude, icy indifference, dumb insolence, and habit of looking at a person as if he had crawled out of a piece of cheese” was taken by the honorary secretary of the South

Canterbury Hotel Association (Mr P. N. McCambridge) today. Mr McCambridge said that the references in “The Press” on Tuesday to the apparent aloofness of hotel receptionists, and other derogatory remarks were quite unjustified. He said that tourists had commented to him on the pleasant nature, ability, and helpfulness of hotel receptionists throughout New Zealand. Receptionists in South Canterbury, though few, were extremely courteous, and a decent type of girl. They were traditionally above the average because of the public relations work they performed and their knowledge of the workings of the hotel industry, said Mr McCambridge. Another delegate had facetiously attributed the alleged punctiliousness, coldness, and superciliousness of hotel receptionists to the fact that they were “constantly warding off commercial travellers.” “It is a slur, not only on the high moral character of commercial travellers generally, but also on receptionists and hotel management,” said a member of the Commercial Travellers • and Warehousemen’s Association, Mr F. J. Hendon, of Christchurch. He said that it was unworthy of a public relations officer to single out commercial travellers as targets for his insinuations. Commercial travellers brought into the 1 community a font of business and good will, and continu-l ously patronised hotels, which were endeavouring to increase, their value to the community i and to the tourist trade as a whole.