The summers here in Calgary are gorgeous. Blue skies with those little cotton candy clouds, the horizon endless to the east and bordered by the Rocky Mountains to the west, being in Calgary for an Alberta summer is a great experience. The nights out here in the Prairies are actually quite cool, sometimes going right down to around 5 degrees (Celsius obviously, we are after all in Canada). This is actually a good thing because the days are scorching hot, especially when there's a heat wave.
Like most of the buildings in Downtown Calgary, ours was built in the 1970s. At the time the city was undergoing a boom and office buildings were sprouting up like mushrooms after a rain. Now, maybe there is something to that whole 'Global Warming' thing and the city was a lot colder back then, or maybe it was just too expensive at the time, but our building and most, if not all, of the rest of 1970s-era Calgary was built without Air Conditioning. There are a lot of things produced by the 1970s that defy logic, and I've given up trying to find the reasoning behind denying your tenants the option to cool off in the summer. What was important in all of this is that in the first summer of its operation Nuvo did not have A/C and we were losing business because of it.
In these days of online booking a good percentage of our guests were making their reservations with us through Expedia, Travelocity and the like and because of this they never really got to take a good look at our hotel before they committed to staying here. As a result we took on a lot of guests who had no idea that they had just booked into a hotel that was not equipped with air conditioning during what turned out to be a near legendary heat wave. I just want to take a second here to point out that when I say 'near legendary' I am not making use of hyperbole, the heat wave that hit Alberta in July nearly crippled the agricultural industry. Fun stuff.
Our original plan for dealing with the A/C was to shop around and get the best price possible, then find a quiet week somewhere and install them all. The flaw with this plan was that it depended on us having plenty of time to pick a unit based on its price, aesthetics and efficiency. Unfortunately, we were getting complaints as early as the first week of July and walkouts barely a week later. So, instead of leisurely ordering some units and having them sent over on the slow boat from Korea, we ended up scrambling to acquire enough serviceable units from the local hardware stores. After a week or so of frenzied buying, returning and installing we now have two different styles of A/C units[1, 2] spread out over the different rooms of the hotel and the average temperature level in our rooms has gone from sweltering hot to refrigerator cold.
As it turned out, getting a number of different A/C units actually worked out better than obtaining one uniform style. None of the rooms in Nuvo are exactly alike, the layouts are similar sure, but each room has different furniture and decorations than the next. Having a varied style of A/C appliances doesn't break that motif, and since the units we eventually obtained are portable we can remove or add them at the behest of our guests. We can also take them out during the other eight months of the year when Calgary becomes a city-sized Popsicle, thus reducing both our carbon footprint and our electricity bill.
P.S. Two days after we installed the A/C the heat wave broke and Calgary got more rain in three days than it did in the last three months. Air Conditioning was no longer an issue.
No comments:
Post a Comment