How to Run a Business in Australia

During our hunt for “permanent” (I say that lightly as any expat on an international mobile contract knows. Perhaps it is more apt to say temporarily permanent, or permanent until we have a week’s notice that it’s not) housing in Perth, we are staying at a hotel that H’s company chose for us. It is a similar cost to any four star global chain you might recognize, but it’s a national chain and appears to be locally franchised. Our introduction to it on March 6^th was that at 8:30 PM, reception was closed for the night and we could get our keys from a box by the door and find our room ourselves. We were told on the slip of paper left in the envelope with our room key that housekeeping excluded Sundays and public holidays, the first of many hotel firsts to come. I should pre-empt this post by saying that I adjust my expectations based on country (i.e. first world or third world) and cost of the hotel, among a variety of other things. I may like nice things but I don’t require them.

The next hotel (or even youth hostel) first that we encountered was upon entering the room to find ants all over the kitchen and bathroom. Lovely but at that late WA hour of 8:30 PM, there wasn’t anything we could do about it until the morning. So we settled in to find our next first world hotel firsts, no toilet paper in the ant covered bathroom and three channels on the television.

The next morning we went to formally check-in and to deposit our “room maintenance request” asking that they do something about the ants that were not just in the kitchen and bathroom, but all over the hotel room. When we got back to our room that evening, we saw a can of bug spray sitting on the ant covered kitchen counter, that request was a success. As it was Saturday evening, the reception office was closed, and the next day being Sunday, we would have to wait until Monday to try again. On Monday we submitted another request for something to be done about the ant problem as well as the leaking shower that we had listened to the constant drip of for two nights, about two and a half feet from our bed. That afternoon I returned to find that nothing had been done about our maintenance requests, and also found that none of our empty toiletries (soap and shampoo), had been replaced, another hotel first.

Finally on Tuesday, I learned how to run a business in Australia when I came back to my room after lunch to put away some groceries I had purchased and found two people knocking on my door. The first was an overweight woman in a denim mini skirt, white tank top, and bright red bra who introduced herself as the “owner” of the hotel. The man with her was the exterminator that she had brought in, “on her own expense” to deal with, “our ant problem” that she implied we were responsible for, having opened our hotel room door four nights earlier to an ant infested apartment. She then continued to tell me that the ants can be a result of our messy kitchen (that I had yet to cook in and where I stored all of the food in the refrigerator), if I wasn’t happy with the hotel, I could check out (knowing that I was a month long corporate booking, good business sense) and move into a “less leafy” high rise hotel where they were less likely to have ants and cockroaches. I thanked her for that suggestion but reminded her that I was booked into “her” hotel by my company who used them as a preferred hotel for their numerous bookings, that thankfully we hadn’t seen any cockroaches, and that given that the ants were there when we arrived, I had yet to use the kitchen and had no food out of the refrigerator, that I didn’t really see what else I could do on my end. She ignored this and went to look at the still unfixed leaking shower, because apparently that was my fault as well. Shockingly enough, we never saw another ant after the exterminator’s visit. Moral of the story is, to run a business in Australia, be aggressive and rude to clients. Blame maintenance issues on them and don’t replace bathroom toiletries or clean a multi month old crusted piece of pizza off the wall behind the clear glass television stand. Obviously if you do not do any or all of the above, you might continuously have a relatively full hotel, make some kind of profit, and have to pay the ~40% Australian tax rate on income over $80,000. It’s much better to earn less, pay less taxes, and come out with about the same amount of cash in your bank account.