Covers are counted three ways, by the till, by the host on the door and by the kitchen's own stock, because breakfast is where a hotel loses money. All three say one more than the room list allows.
I am the food and beverage manager of a ninety two room hotel and breakfast is the single most audited meal we serve.
That surprises people. Dinner has a bill and a card machine and it looks like a business. Breakfast has nobody paying, because it is in the rate, so the only way to know what it cost us is to count it, and if you do not count it you find out at the year end that your breakfast cost of sale is nine per cent out and you cannot say why.
So it is counted three ways, every morning, and the three ways are independent.
The host on the door has a sheet. Room number and number of people, written down as they walk in. That is the primary count and it exists so we can query a room that claims it did not have breakfast.
The till. Every cover is keyed as a zero value transaction against the room, because the PMS needs the posting even at zero for the accounting to work.
And the kitchen. The chef counts out of stock: eggs, sausages, bacon, pastries, and the number of covers is derived from the consumption against a standard. Not precise to one person on a given day, but precise over a week.
Then there is the room list, which is the occupied rooms and the guests in them, out of the system, which is the ceiling on all of it.
Our covers come to one more than the room list allows. Every morning.
Not over a week. Every single morning, and I have checked this for three years.
The host sheet has one more person on it than the room list says is in the building. The till has that cover posted. And the kitchen's consumption, averaged over a week, is seven covers a week above what the room list would give you.
What it looks like on the sheet.
The host writes a room number against every cover, because that is the entire point of the sheet.
The extra cover is always written against a room that is occupied. A real room, with real guests in it, who really came down.
So a room with two guests in it appears on the sheet with three.
It is never the same room twice in a month. I have mapped three years of it and there is no room that takes it more often than chance would give it, except that it is never a single occupancy room. Always a room with two or more in it.
I have stood on the door myself.
Not once. Forty or fifty times over three years, because I decided the only way to resolve it was to do the count myself and stop reading other people's sheets.
I count the same. I write two against a room with two in it, and I write every room, and at the end of service I add up my sheet and it is one more than the room list, and I cannot show you where the extra one went in, because I wrote every line of it and every line is a room and a number I am sure of.
The first time that happened I thought I had simply made an arithmetic error, so the second time I added the column up four times and photographed the sheet.
The photograph adds up to one more than the room list. I have twenty three photographs.
The room list is the thing I have tried hardest to break, because a wrong ceiling would explain everything.
A guest who checked in and is not on the list. Possible in theory and impossible here, because a key card is encoded against a reservation and a guest with no reservation has no card and cannot get through the lobby door after eleven, never mind into a room.
A child not counted. This is the good answer and I chased it for a year. Children are on the reservation and in the room list, because they affect the rate and the breakfast allowance, and our system will not let you check in a family without naming the number of guests.
A member of staff eating. Forbidden in the guest restaurant, and staff food is in the back, and anyway a member of staff would not be written against a guest room.
A guest from another hotel walking in off the street. It is a city centre hotel and that is a real thing that happens, and when it does the host catches it, because they ask for the room number and the room number does not exist or is not occupied.
And the extra cover is always against a room that IS occupied.
The kitchen is the count I trust most and it is the one nobody argues with.
The chef has been here nineteen years and his stock figures are the best numbers in this building. Over a week his consumption says covers, and his covers have been above the room list every week for three years by between five and nine, which is one a day.
He mentioned it to me before I mentioned it to him, in 2022, and he said it in the way a chef says a thing he has already decided not to care about.
He said he cooks one more than he is told to, and always has, and that he started doing it in about 2008 because he kept getting caught short at the end of service, and that he has never once had one left over.
What I have done about it.
I changed the forecast. The kitchen now orders and preps to the room list plus one, which is what the chef was doing anyway, and the result is that our breakfast cost of sale came into line for the first time since I have worked here and my finance director wrote me a nice email about it.
That is the whole resolution. I fixed a number by admitting a person.
The last thing, and it is the only part of this that is not arithmetic.
In the February I was on the door at about twenty past eight on a Sunday, which is the busiest twenty minutes of our week, and a woman came up to the podium and said a room number and said two.
I wrote it down. She was about sixty, in a cardigan, with her glasses on a chain, entirely and completely ordinary.
And she said, while I was writing, without any particular weight on it: "He'll be down in a minute, he's always slow."
I said that was fine and showed her to a table, and I watched that table for the whole of service, because I had two guests on my sheet and one woman in a chair.
Nobody came down. She had her breakfast on her own and read the paper and went back up at about ten past nine.
I looked up the room afterwards. Single occupancy. One guest, in for three nights, a woman travelling alone, and she had breakfast at seven and checked out at eleven, and the host's copy of the sheet, which is the copy I wrote, has two against that room.