While the hazards of being a host or hostess aren’t quite as extreme as those faced by servers, they are similar. A good majority of the people you deal with will be pleasant, but on occasion you’ll have to deal with some truly nasty characters. You might have guests who get angry that they do not have priority embarkation when it comes to boarding the ship – the fact that they have not paid for it being irrelevant, of course. Or you’ll get guests who try to sneak in last-minute reservations, guests who yell at you because they think you’re moving too slowly, and even the occasional irate member of the ship’s crew who is upset at organizational issues relating to the company you work at.
As soon as your shift begins, you don’t even get a second to realize how funny you actually look in a host outfit, and in the blink of an eye you are sent to a crowd of a hundred Spanish and Italian guests who have been waiting for barely two hours to get into the boarding terminal and can’t believe this is happening to them in a country like Germany after having paid loads of money for the trip.
Still, they at least seem to be glad to have finally found somebody from the ship’s crew that speaks their language so they can express their discontent about the organizational issues blighting this Costa Cruise and at the same time request help with finding their lost luggage.
As southern Europeans very often do, they surround you and all start to yell their problems at you at once. Suddenly you’re standing in the middle of the crowd with thirty people screaming at you from all directions so that you don’t even know where to start. Funny that in the preparation seminars you didn’t get any advice on how to solve the customer’s problems. The only thing they told you, repeatedly, was not to admit under any circumstance that you are just a student and actually not part of the ship’s crew. Or in other words, that the customers are just wasting their time shouting at you.
It takes you only a few hours to realize that the best strategy is to let customers speak and yell until they burn out. They will give up at some point and eventually disappear to look for another member of the crew with whom to resume the conversation.
If you can’t control your temper, then a host job is probably not right for you. However, if you’re looking for a fun part-time job that offers flexibility and a fast-paced working environment, then hosting might just be up your alley – especially if you’re only looking for part-time work. All hosts and hostesses at “VIP Hanse Touring” work part time. Since hosts and hostesses usually don’t get any tips, you get paid more per hour than waiters or waitresses do. On average, hosts and hostesses make 9.75 Euro an hour!
Dario Möbius-Gomez
The Rostock Review 