Sunday, September 18, 2016

A Persnickety Spy For Luxury Hotels

On a recent Wednesday evening, Ann, a fifty-three-year-old securities lawyer who lives in Manhattan, checked into Room 310 at a swanky hotel in midtown. (Average nightly rate: four hundred and twenty-eight dollars.) She dropped her purse in the corner and headed straight for the bathroom, where she gripped the sides of the toilet and peered inside. “It checks out,” she said. Back in the room, she sat down on the bed and ran her hands across the dark-gray velvet headboard, which complemented the light-gray velvet comforter. She leaned back slowly on four large, white pillows and bounced up and down a few times. “Firm, but not crazy-firm.” This seemed to satisfy her. Getting up, she stood by the side of the bed, then dropped to her hands and knees. She lifted the sheets and looked under the mattress. “Is that a hair?” she asked, extracting one from the underside of the mattress. She whipped out a notepad and started scribbling.

Ann is a hotel inspector. (She asked that her full name not be used, so that she could protect her identity as an undercover operator, so to speak.) Like a detective analyzing a crime scene for potential clues, Ann travels the world at the behest of Small Luxury Hotels of the World (S.L.H.), poking and prodding her way around hotel rooms, spas, restaurants, and lobbies, and reporting back on everything from how many times a staff member smiles and makes eye contact during an interaction to optimum bed bounciness. She is required to test every aspect of a hotel, from on-site facilities (spa, gym, yoga studio) to food and beverage options (which means breakfast, lunch, dinner, and room service, usually all in one day). “I’m kind of a pain in the ass,” she said. “I’m the one who rings up for new coat hangers.”

S.L.H. is an association of five hundred and twenty luxury boutique hotels in eighty countries. The majority of these hotels are independently owned, and getting the S.L.H. seal of approval is hard: about a thousand hotels look to join the brand every year, but only about five per cent are successful. The vetting procedure can take anywhere from one to three months, and successful entry into the group allows the hotel owner to post a plaque bearing the S.L.H. logo near the entrance—useful marketing for hotels charging upward of three hundred dollars for a single night’s stay.

S.L.H. has around a hundred hotel inspectors, and Ann has been one of them for seven years. Although she travels a lot for work, she performs inspections only during personal vacation time, and inspects between three and five S.L.H. properties a year. She is always reimbursed for her expenses at the hotel.

As a seasoned traveller, Ann has become accustomed to subtle differences among hotels according to what part of the world they’re in. European hotels, for example, excel at “funky bathroom hardware.” American hotels have “smushier” pillows. A hotel in Asia had a nightstand drawer devoted to charging devices, with every kind of international adapter. “I see something like that, there could be rats on the floor and I wouldn’t care,” she said. She’s bagged enough hotel slippers that she keeps a basketful by the door in her apartment for guests. Pens, too: “I could furnish a small school with the amount of hotel pens I have.”

Back in the room in New York, Ann took a peek inside the closet. The robes were soft, and monogrammed with the hotel’s name. The extra blanket and pillowcase warranted a closer look. Ann stood on her tiptoes. Another hair—long and black. She made a face. “Is it the end of the world? No. But at some point, it starts to matter.”

The furniture in the room checked out. A few slight scuffs, but someone had obviously taken pains to paint over them. “It’s a high-traffic room, I get it.” Next to the bed, a large tablet displayed touch-screen controls for the television, blinds, and thermostat. A sleeping app had options for sounds like “rocky beach” and “crickets.” Ann pressed “crickets”—and the noise of a thousand angry insects filled the room. “God, no,” she yelled, trying to turn it off.

The perception of an untouched, unscuffed room is a powerful marketing tool. We may be in control of our environment when we’re at home, but we’re at the mercy of someone else when we stay in a hotel. This is why we crave the illusion of a space that looks and smells brand-new, unsoiled by the hands—and hairs—of other humans. “The best hotels try to create an impression of what perfect, effortless living would be like,” Sean Hennessey, an assistant professor at N.Y.U.’s Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism, said. “Hotel managers try very hard to have rooms look pristine, including having the housekeeper vacuum while walking out backwards, so there are no footprints in the carpet. Seeing someone else’s hair in your sink shatters that illusion.” (Though the idea of “hospitality” may be changing: compare this to the Airbnb experience, which encourages travellers not just to acknowledge that someone else lives in that space but to embrace it.)

Every now and then, Ann snapped a picture on her smartphone and tapped some notes into an app, which has replaced the forty-one-page document that inspectors used to be required to fill out. After an inspection is finished, S.L.H. sends the hotel an official report, and if there are problems the hotel has thirty days to clean up its act. Other luxury hotels also use inspectors, too, both for in-person inspections as well as for online and voice reservations. According to Hennessey, one of the benefits of hotel mystery shoppers, as they’re known in the industry, is that they help insure employees don’t lose their edge. “Mystery shoppers check for specific acts, like employees saying ‘Good morning’ as well as ‘Would you like another drink or would you like to upgrade to suite for only fifty dollars?’ ” Hennessey told me. His daughter once worked in reservations at a boutique New York hotel, where she became proficient in sniffing out undercover inspectors. “The caller says they’ll be in New York next week and asks if the Yankees will be in town,” Hennessey said. “Then the caller will ask if the hotel can arrange a massage. Who goes to a Yankees game and then gets a massage?”

by Laura Parker, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image: Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum