Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

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СКАЧАТЬ stress that the guest must be able to get whatever she wants, including having prescriptions picked up, salon shampoo delivered to the room, and a cell phone retrieved from the restaurant where she had lunch. But more extreme examples abound. At one Four Seasons property, for instance, the maitre d’ lent his tuxedo to a guest who did not have one for a black tie event, and even had the trousers altered for him.³⁴ As I have mentioned, on two separate occasions, Max, the Luxury Garden concierge, convinced the manager of a local department store to open early for guests with urgent needs for clothing. Another concierge, Alec, literally lent the shoes off his feet to a guest whose own shoes had been misplaced by the housekeeping department. When a group of incoming guests at the Royal Court wanted to rent two new-model Mercedes SUVs, front desk workers found a rental agency that could provide them, though it entailed having the vehicles delivered from several hundred miles away. At the same hotel, I was asked to find a gauze bandage for a woman who had recently undergone knee surgery and then to assist her in dressing her leaky wound.

      In both hotels, my coworkers and I were asked to perform many services for guests. A partial list, culled from my field notes, illustrates the broad range: “Find doctor; find live crab, feathers, balloons; find white truffles; take shoes to be fixed; take luggage to be fixed; find gown; reserve spa for six, rental van, all-day limo; obtain video of local performance; arrange babysitting; get cell phones, Japanese furniture, cigars; find sheet music; find blue roses; find jade jewelry; plan out-of-town day trip; find pediatrician; give directions to local farmer's market; find out about tea set used in hotel's restaurant; arrange for local golf; get kosher takeout menu; find Greek Orthodox church; arrange camera equipment rental; open package arriving for departed guest and send back to him; arrange for spa, watsu treatment, shiatsu; get symphony tickets; find yoga clothes, particular designer furniture; find computer equipment; find map store; arrange helicopter tour; find and make appointment with German-speaking dentist; get shoelaces; find tailor; make hotel reservations in New Orleans; get coat left at restaurant and send to guest; get birthday cake for tonight; find Catholic church; place T-shirts and welcome packages in incoming guests’ rooms; get ginger root for tea; send champagne to incoming guests on behalf of a friend; find out about lobby furniture; find out about duvet cover in room; find artificial orchids; get baseball tickets; mail knife; put rose petals on bed; find lost child.”

      The list for one especially demanding Luxury Garden guest, Dr. Kramer, compiled over several visits, included “get electronics; get cotton jogging clothes; make hotel reservation; make copies; get stapler; get sushi; fix e-mail access; find battery for cell phone; get luggage fixed; get rental car exchanged; find access to Internet for his computer; fix luggage; get temps; get more temps; find Indian food; change room; fix cell phone; find CDs; get newspaper; give message to models waiting for him in lobby; find cell phone help; rent convertible; find directions to state park; make laptop work.”

      Recognition work also entails that the worker legitimate these needs by responding sympathetically. Workers are expected to show concern about any situation the guest finds difficult, from a missed flight to a cloudy day. This standard extends to moments when the guest is dissatisfied with the hotel service itself. Alice, the Luxury Garden human resources manager, emphasized five elements of responding to guest complaints, the second of which was “apologize first.” She said that when she studied guest complaints, most guests claimed, “All I wanted was someone to listen and care,” or said, “No one apologized.” She said the appropriate emotional response was especially important in the luxury hotel because “we don't have clientele that count pennies,” so monetary compensation when something went wrong was less meaningful to them. Sebastian, the general manager, told me in an interview that guests were most likely to complain that “their needs weren't met” and that “they weren't heard.”

      Guests value worker responsiveness to their needs and problems, seeing it as a key dimension of luxury service. For example, one guest at the Luxury Garden wrote in a letter to the general manager, “Antonio [the guest services manager] and his staff were extremely courteous and helpful when we needed to locate our lost luggage. I am sure that we seemed very high maintenance at one point when several calamities occurred at once. But Antonio and his people never complained nor seemed in any way reticent to attack each challenge as it arose.” Asked in an interview what he meant by “caring service,” Herbert invoked both recognition of needs and their legitimation, as well as personalization:

      When you're in the hotel and you order room service and—because I get up early, and I make a motion to the room service waiter that my wife and son are still asleep in the next room. The next morning the same waiter comes and delivers the breakfast and taps so quietly on the door I almost didn't know he was there because he noticed—that's sort of a very concrete example. He really did care that he didn't want to wake them and knew I wanted to have coffee in the morning, and that's really legitimate.

      Guests also see it as a failure of service when workers do not acknowledge their problems. Christina described a stay at a hotel where “everything” had gone wrong; among other things, she and her husband were given a room much smaller than the suite they had reserved. She said, “If they had put flowers in the small room or a fruit basket or whatever, all would have been forgiven, but we were totally ignored.”³⁵ Shirley described a bad experience in which the staff upgraded her but did not respond to her complaint that the room smelled musty: “They kind of pooh-poohed my concern and acted as if I wasn't being appreciative enough of the upgrade.” Here staff failed to legitimate the guest's need, assuming that the bigger room would be more important to her than the odor.

      Legitimation of guests’ needs carries another dimension: a sense of unlimitedness. The imperative to “never say no to a guest” is a mantra in luxury hotels. Check-in and check-out times were rarely enforced at the Luxury Garden, for example; if a guest decided to stay another night, he was not refused, even if that meant overbooking the hotel. One manager told me that imposing these rules would violate “five-star service,” especially given the rates guests were paying. The general manager at the Royal Court stressed several times in an all-employee meeting that “the guest needs to be able to get anything he wants.” He said, “We can't let rules get in the way,” berating the staff for turning a guest away from the restaurant because he had arrived five minutes late for breakfast. “For four hundred dollars,” he said sarcastically, “we should be able to find a piece of bacon somewhere in this building.”

      Guests approved of this idea that rules could be bent or broken for them, and they often saw a willingness to transgress as a defining feature of luxury establishments in contrast to midrange hotels. One couple wrote a comment card to the Luxury Garden praising the hotel for providing breakfast at 10:30 P.M. On comment cards, several guests at both hotels lauded the chef for making vegetarian meals available. Tom, after citing an instance in which a Four Seasons had accommodated his request for a special meeting room, said of luxury hotels, “You just don't have problems. You just don't hear about rules and stuff—you know, they solve [problems]. They basically do everything humanly possible in these nicer hotels to meet whatever you want and make it a wonderful stay for you and your family.” Betty, the consultant, described her experience:

      If I ask—like the Ritz-Carlton in Boston is one of my favorite hotels, and if I ask for something there they'll do whatever they need to do to fix it, to accommodate me. But if I would go to, say—I was staying in some [nonluxury] place in Washington about four months ago and all I needed was some pens for my room and I got an argument at the desk…. You know they're not going to go out of their way for anything unless you have an argument with them, and that bothers me…. [In luxury hotels] you don't hear, “We don't do it that way,” or “We can't do it that way,” or “We don't have that here,” that kind of thing.

      Again, the guest is given the sense of unlimited entitlement in the fulfillment of her needs.

       “Pampering”: Displays of Labor

      Another key element of luxury service, though it is not explicitly acknowledged as such either in the industry or СКАЧАТЬ