Female travelling woes

I think I mentioned in a post a couple of years ago that the only people who think business travelling is glamorous are those that don’t have to do it. It palls very quickly and, for me, the only upside is nabbing a nice duty-free bottle of cognac, or single-malt, on the way back in. (Alcohol prices in Malaysia being somewhere north of stratospheric.)

For a female business traveller flying about alone, however, there is an added complication. TWF. Travelling While Female. When I travel on my company’s dime, there isn’t so much of a difference in hotel accommodation. The company rate kicks in, the company set of rooms kick in and, although I was placed right next to the ground-floor elevator once in a small “boutique” hotel, it didn’t happen again, so I can write it off as a quirk. However, if you’re travelling on your own dime, without the name of some big company behind you, then that room next to the elevator, or the housekeeping cart depot, or some other place that seems to gather noise at 1:00am in the morning the way your belly button gathers lint? It’s yours. It’s a foregone conclusion. And, as if to guard my chastity, I’m always, but always, given a room with two single beds. In Perth, Australia, one time, I remember being given a cramped, sloping room next to a giant machinery installation with one single bed pushed up against the wall. Sigh.

Things get no better when you’re eating. I remember reading once that a female business veteran used to light the corner of her menu and hold it aloft in order to get some attention. Well, since we’re not allowed to carry anything as dangerous as cuticle scissors on planes any more, that nixes that idea. However, I have held the menu above my head and waved it around a few times. And I’ve also been known to stand up and say in a loud voice (and I have a loud voice to begin with), “Excuse me. May I get some service here please?” If you didn’t know me from this blog, you’d think I was an awfully polite (but perennially irritated) person.

Part of the eating non-experience is the seating arrangement. On my most recent trip last week, I was given a table right in front of the hotel’s restaurant entrance. This was a lovely spot where people both entering and exitting the restaurant could swarm on either side of me as they walked. When I asked (politely) for another table, not willing to let every stranger see what I was indulging in for breakfast, the maitre d‘s lips tightened before she led me to a lovely small table, away from the hubub, surrounded by eight (count ‘em … eight!) other small tables that also lay empty. As the male travellers trooped in, they were guided automatically to those tables. But I had to ask for it.

You know what? I’m sick of it. Sick of getting tables right next to the public toilets, or adjacent to the kitchen doors, or in the place where you’d normally find a traffic light to manage the pedestrian ebbs and flows. I’m sick of getting ignored when all I want to do is just order some damn dinner and get back to my room to relax. I think the thing that really gets me about all this, however, is that I’m just as liable to get dissed by female hotel staff as by male. Being female themselves, you’d think that the staff would be a little sensitive to others of their gender type, but my observations last week led me to believe that — in fact — we are treated somewhat worse. I even had to call back the lady loaded with the hot coffee and tea flasks because she was making such a determined bee-line for the two men sitting at a table just beyond me that she forgot me. Twice. Walked straight past me as if I wasn’t there.

I can complain. But this TWF phenomenon is such a pervasive habit — from the United States, to Singapore, to England, to Australia, to Malaysia, to Ireland — that writing some bad feedback just does nothing. I only have finite energy and have to pick my battles, and this isn’t going to be one of them. So I try to be polite to get better service — in the hope I don’t later find saliva in my dinner or something like that — but I don’t expect it, and so remain pleasantly surprised when I actually get treated with some modicum of respect. And you’d be surprised what I can sleep through nowadays.