Birthday surprise

My husband recently found himself alone on his birthday in Thailand, where he was attending a seminar. I decided to surprise him by emailing a request to Holiday Inn Bangkok, where he was staying. The request was simple: for them to print out the attached birthday greeting that my daughter and I had made for him and to give it to him when he came down to avail of the breakfast buffet.

Given the simplicity of my request, I actually expected their positive response but was still pleased when I got it.  What happened next was unexpected. Since he had so many assignments, hubby didn’t go down for the breakfast buffet but went straight to the seminar room, also located inside the hotel, to start working.

What was nice about the whole thing was that the hotel’s executive lounge personnel kept emailing me updates.  They finally decided to send a small birthday cake, along with the printout which they put inside a nice envelope, to his room.   One of them, Warisa, even emailed me a picture of the cake.

Hubby was laughing when he called me up late in the afternoon since he had not expected anything of the sort.  He saw the cake and the printout when he dropped by his room to drop off the seminar materials before going out for dinner with his colleagues. Of course, he shared the whole story (and the cake) with them.  

I know that the more highly-rated hotels do this kind of thing. The more jaded would say that the hotel, in turn, gets PR points, especially in this age of social networking.  It is also true that the goodwill generated actually costs more than a small cake.  But it doesn’t lessen the surprise.  And it doesn’t negate the gesture, especially since I was this non-guest from the Philippines with an email request that they could have ignored, but didn’t.  Instead, they took me very seriously.

Did I share this story on FB? Of course!  As I said in my FB post, "ako yata ang nag-birthday sa tuwa".