Archive for the ‘Tips for Travelers’ Category

Hotel Housekeeping: Lysol Comes to the Rescue

November 9th, 2006

In the past few months I’ve received lots of great stories from readers about their hotel experiences: the good, the bad, the ugly and the hilarious. I encourage you to send me yours by clicking any of the “comments” link below. All comments are monitored, so please keep them clean and brief. Oh, and try to leave the boring parts out.

Now on to my rant. Recently there’s been a barrage of stories in the media regarding a study that found travelers leave a lot more than toothbrushes and socks behind at hotels. They leave germs too. Nasty germs with scary names like rhinovirus that lurk on TV remotes, light switches and hotel pens. In the ensuing panic, many overlooked the fact that the study was conducted before rooms were cleaned, not after. Even more suspect, it was sponsored by Lysol. No bias there.

If you’re going to freak out over germs you should probably be more concerned about the journey to your hotel. Think airplanes, airport bathrooms and taxi cabs. Unlike hotel rooms, which are occupied by one or two people and cleaned from top to bottom prior to your arrival, these places can be virtually festering with rhino-type viruses and God knows what else. Now that’s scary.

Another thing that hotels are battling these days is “amenity creep”. Now before you run off in a panic to take a scalding shower and spray Lysol all over your body, I should explain that it’s not some incurable flesh-eating disease brought on by secretly recycled hotel bath amenities. It refers to the hotel practice of adding new amenities to keep up with changes in technology, lifestyle and guest preferences. These litte extras can range from an eye soother to a spa. When one hotel adds one thing it forces competitors to follow suit, which can lead to the never-ending race known as amenity creep.

Guests appreciate these little extras – as long as they don’t have to pay for them. But they also increase hotel operating costs, and rooms can become so cluttered guests think they’ve walked into an occupied room. There’s something to say for the stark minimalism of the St Paul in Montreal or the Hotel on Rivington in New York, where my room didn’t even have a clock radio.

No one has been hit harder by amenity creep than the housekeeping department, whose job has become increasingly complex and physically demanding. When Westin introduced Heavenly Beds, which consist of “a custom-designed pillow-top mattress set with 900 individual coils, 3 sheets, a down blanket – 3 versions for 3 different climates, comforter, crisp white duvet, and 5 goosedown/feather pillows”, I’m sure room attendants were totally unimpressed. They probably long for the days of a simple foam pad, two flat pillows and a floral bedspread. But guests don’t, so things aren’t likely to get easier.

Opus is not immune to this insidious disease. In fact, we might be a carrier. When we opened in 2002 we stocked our rooms with cordless phones, safes, irons, bathrobes, mini-bars, coffee stations and more, and we’ve been adding things since. Recently, we introduced CDs and bedside books, hand-selected to complement our five lifestyle-inspired décor schemes. Housekeeping staff must match the coloured dot on the CD or book with the colour of the room or they’re fired (kidding). All the more reason not to forget to leave a tip for the room attendant. When I travel I even tidy up my room before the maid arrives. But that’s because I don’t want her to think I’m a slob.

“Technology creep” (I just made this term up; feel free to borrow it, it’s going to be big) is another challenge for guests and staff. When I worked at the Metropolitan Hotel the penthouse suite had a state-of-the-art entertainment system, but no one knew how to work it except for the owner, who lived in Toronto. Last Saturday I spent a night at Opus and experienced technology rage (another new term, also bound to be big). Upon arrival, everything in my room was perfect: bed turned down, curtains shut, stereo playing the first song on the hotel’s Magnum Opus CD. Then the song repeated itself. Again. And again. I spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to turn the damned repeat function off, almost hurling it out the window, then finally gave up and switched it off.

Sometimes, silence and simplicity are best.

The Tyranny of the Mistreated Traveller

August 11th, 2006

I’m still smarting from a review posted on a travel website recently by an unhappy guest. It’s hard not to take these comments personally. I’m passionate about the hotel, as are my staff, and we want everyone to love Opus. The frustrating thing is the review is anonymous, so I can’t respond and try to make things right.

With the ever-increasing popularity of websites like TripAdvisor, Fodors and Yahoo Travel, consumers are more empowered than ever, and hotels are at their mercy. Travellers can now bypass the propaganda on the hotel’s website and go direct to its guests for the real story. The day we hoteliers have always feared has arrived, God help us all. No more smoke and mirrors!

As a traveller, however, I love this new trend. Problem is, consumers don’t always agree. In my search for hotels in Rome for my upcoming vacation, I’ve come across hotel reviews ranging from “THIS HOTEL ROCKS!” to “THIS HOTEL SUCKS!” Which do I believe? Since the reviews are anonymous, how do I know that the “ROCKS!” reviewer isn’t the hotel manager, or his mother? If I follow his advice and it turns out the hotel really does suck, how can I hunt him down and hurt him for spoiling my vacation?

Fortunately, many of these sites rank hotels and give averages, so negative and positive comments tend to balance out. There are also helpful tips and entertaining anecdotes. Whenever I want to feel better about myself I read up on the “worst rated” hotels. Some sites even feature amateur photos. But even the most beautiful hotels look kind of scary without a professional photographer, stylist and supermodels posing as rapturous travellers. As for bogus reviews, TripAdvisor claims to review all submissions before they’re posted, and penalizes hotels for fake reviews. I don’t know why a hotel would spend time fabricating reviews anyway; it only sets up false expectations. I’d rather focus on fine-tuning services to generate authentic reviews.

The immature, spiteful side of me sometimes wishes there was a website for hotels to rate guests. I’d give a “not impressed” rating to the guest who trashed a room last weekend and was found naked, drunk and bleeding from the you-know-what in the hallway after getting a Prince Albert (look it up at your own risk!). And I’d give a “very disappointed” rating to the guest who wrote a scathing, libelous letter about me that was published in Condé Nast Traveler after her car was towed from a clearly-marked no-parking zone and I refused to reimburse her. That happened 12 years ago, but I’m still mad. Otherwise, I’d write rave reviews about Opus guests, who are generally well-traveled, super-cool, and spend lots of money. Oh, except for the guy who checked in a few months ago and racked up over $4,000 in charges – with a stolen credit card. I’d probably give him a “do not recommend.”

If you have a bad hotel experience my advice is to contact the general manager directly and give him or her a chance to fix things. Try not to embellish your story or say nasty, malicious things about staff. Listing all the important people you know personally won’t really advance your case, either. Stick to the facts, and present a fair assessment of your experience. If you want compensation, say so. If you’ve been mistreated, any respectable general manager will acknowledge this and will make amends. We didn’t work our way up the ladder in the hospitality business from being petty and defensive.

If you’re not happy with the response, then by all means go ahead and publicize your experience on a travel website. But again, give a fair, rational assessment, which will lend you greater credibility. Try to avoid hyperbole, as in “it was the absolutely most unbelievably worst experience ever in my whole entire life”. Also, go easy on the CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation marks!!!!! You risk being written off as an embittered, raving, possibly unstable person.

I’m always appreciative when guests take the time to provide feedback, good or bad. Either way, it helps me understand what we’re doing right and what we can do better. Fortunately, I get loads of positive comments and very few negative comments. But it’s the negative comments that keep me up at night. It’s like throwing a party and everyone but one person shows up, but instead of celebrating the amazing turnout you spend the night in a corner obsessing over why that person didn’t show. If you’re like me, you’ll do everything you can to ensure that person shows up next time and has a great time.

Guest comments are always welcome at comments@opushotel.com. All are reviewed and answered by me – unless they’re anonymous.

We Want Our Word Back

June 21st, 2006

Several years ago, the term “boutique hotel” arrived on the travel scene. Today, it seems like every second hotel is calling itself boutique, from 800-room properties to highway motels to mega chains. There are also boutique salons, ad agencies, law firms, hardware stores and pet stores. Everywhere, businesses are pilfering this precious term to distinguish themselves from the big-box-style retailers. And in the process, they’re ruining it for everyone.

We want our word back. It’s ours.

What exactly is a boutique hotel? Like the word “attractive” in personal ads, the term boutique is used loosely – and often generously – in the hotel industry. To me, a boutique hotel is defined by its size (200 rooms max), its ambience (intimate), its service (personalized), its independence (no chain affiliation) and its outlets (people actually use the restaurant and lounge). The design of a boutique hotel should reflect the city it’s in. And guests shouldn’t have to stumble through revolving doors to get in, or line up at the front desk behind hundreds of cruise ship passengers, or jostle with conventioneers wearing badges and silly hats. In a contemporary boutique hotel, brass and fussy floral arrangements should be banished, along with the music of Vivaldi and portraits of dead people.

When it comes to sullying the boutique name, there are no worse offenders than boutique hotels themselves. Many offer style or substance, but few provide both. Some are built around a hot lounge scene, but service is inconsistent and guestrooms feel like an afterthought (perhaps a deliberate ploy to keep guests out of rooms and in the lounge drinking). Others offer beautiful guestrooms and great service, but the lounge is about as lively as a public library. My favourite boutique hotels have style and substance. In the US they include Hotel Gansevoort and 60 Thompson in New York, The Mondrian and The Viceroy in LA, and Hotel Vitale and The Clift in San Francisco. While not technically boutiques, W hotels and a few of the Four Seasons also do this well.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that boutique hotels are more expensive. This is partly quality related, partly market related: fewer rooms + high demand = higher rates. But it also has to do with economies of scale. Boutiques don’t order 50,000 bottles of shampoo at one time or serve 1,200 dinner guests. Uniqueness is part of the appeal, of course, and many travellers are willing to pay a premium for it. In the 1970s, the Holiday Inn’s slogan was “The Best Surprise Is No Surprise”. These days, travellers want surprises, as long as they don’t involve lost reservations or rodents scurrying across the floor.

Of course, not every hotel wants to be a boutique, and not every traveller wants to stay in a boutique hotel. Larger hotels can offer more space, better facilities, a more consistent product, and guest loyalty and frequent flier programs. At Opus we maintain that a traveller who chooses a hotel based on how many points she’ll collect toward an upgrade on her next car rental is probably not the best fit for us. There are plenty of other options in Vancouver.

Sometimes it’s fun to stay in big, grand hotels, landmark hotels, historic hotels – as long as they don’t smell musty. The largest hotel in the world is the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, with between 5,690 and 5,034 rooms, depending on the source (I’m not convinced management even knows). It comes with a sports arena, entertainment dome and wedding chapel. In fact, Vegas is home to 17 of the world’s 20 largest hotels. I stayed at The Venetian once (pictured above), which, at 4,027 suites averaging 700 square feet, ranks #4. Upon returning to the hotel each night (okay, each morning) it felt like I had to walk past all 4,000 suites to get to mine. A shuttle bus would have been nice. In Dubai, the upcoming Asia Asia Hotel plans to dethrone the MGM, with a whopping 6,500 rooms – a small city.

All this talk about big hotels is humbling, what with Opus’s mere 96 rooms, no sister properties, and no wedding chapel. Maybe we should become a boutique chain? This term is an oxymoron in my opinion. But some companies, like Kimpton and Joie de Vivre, have succeeded in building a collection while preserving each property’s individual personality. Buoyed by its success with W Hotels, Starwood has introduced aloft hotels, claiming on its website to be “re-imagining the classic American ‘On The Road’ tradition and giving rise to a hotel of new heights. A hotel so far above anything in its class that it can only be called by one name: aloft.” My rough translation: tarted-up motels for thrifty-but-cool travellers, with advertising copy written by a guy who used to write superhero movie trailers.

Now that the chains have stolen the word “boutique”, along with some of our best ideas, we in the boutique business better keep innovating. Fortunately, this is easier for us because we don’t have to wait for approval from corporate office. Stay tuned for advances in in-room technology, entertainment, amenities and environmentally friendly practices, along with even greater personalization.

And we best be finding another word for boutique.

Silent Shoppers

June 6th, 2006


Once a year at Opus we recruit “silent shoppers” to stay at the hotel anonymously and evaluate the experience. They book a room like a regular guest, pay full rate, have drinks in the lounge and dinner in the restaurant, order room service, and test the hotel’s facilities and services. To preserve anonymity, we rebate their charges after they’ve checked out. Tough job, I know. But it’s a great investment for the hotel because it provides a detailed, objective assessment of the guest experience.

Two silent shoppers stayed at Opus last month. Their silence is now over; the reports are in. I read through them yesterday, holding my breath, fearing something unusual and horrible might have happened.

The shoppers were Susan, a respected industry veteran who has run some of Vancouver’s best hotels, including the Pan Pacific and the Metropolitan, and Tom, an executive with Morgan’s Hotel Group and formerly with Ritz Carlton. Opus is a contemporary boutique hotel, but we seek a range of backgrounds in our shoppers. Contemporary or traditional, large or small, many of the same standards apply – luxury is luxury. To get a variety of perspectives, sometimes we bring in shoppers with no hotel background. Last year we recruited Chris, a partner with Rethink Advertising, avid traveller and boutique hotel aficionado. His assessment was so impressive we hired his firm to refresh our brand.

At chain hotels I’ve worked at we were always in fear of shoppers, whether from head office, ownership, the management company or a travel rating program like AAA. Our greatest dread was that we would appear in one of these reports as the indifferent employee, or the incompetent one, or the one who spilled hot coffee on the inspector. So we regarded each guest as a potential shopper.

The AAA evaluation process was always interesting. The inspector would arrive in town to check out a bunch of hotels, and by the time he got to ours we had been tipped off. We’d roll out the red carpet, so the inspector’s experience was never that of a typical guest. This was sometimes necessary in order to pass the inspection, however, for AAA criteria is strict and unforgiving, particularly for 5-Diamond hotels. One hotel I worked at had its rating downgraded from 5-Diamond to 4, which was devastating to morale. At the time I feared I was somehow responsible, that my name was highlighted repeatedly in that fateful report, even though I worked in sales and had no contact with the inspector.

Certain membership organizations have sales people they pass off as “inspectors”, dispatching them to hotels to evaluate the experience, then extending an “exclusive invitation” to join the club – for a substantial fee.

One night when I was duty manager at the Pan Pacific we were expecting the chain’s president to check in. His suite had been inspected by virtually every manager, with a meticulousness and paranoia rivalling the Secret Service. Unfortunately, no one recognized him upon arrival. He was registered without ceremony and sent off unescorted to one of the smallest rooms in the hotel. When I found out I was mortified. I chased him down, but he waved me away, insisting on experiencing the hotel from a regular guest’s perspective. Things must have gone okay, because I didn’t get fired.

As for this month’s shoppers reports, I’m happy to say that Opus fared exceptionally well. There is always room for improvement, of course, and the feedback from Tom and Susan will help us to get better. This week I’ll be reviewing the report in detail with all department heads.

And then we can focus our attention on the really important shoppers, our paying guests.

The Holy Grail of the Hotel Business

May 26th, 2006

It’s been a busy week at Opus. The hotel has been sold out all week. Well, almost. The holy grail of the hotel business is the “perfect fill”, when every room is occupied and no guests are relocated. It’s proven elusive this week.

Relocating is the hotel industry’s equivalent of an airline bumping a passenger. But hotels do it less frequently and we’re nicer about it. Relocates, or “walks”, are also executed more discreetly by hotels; for starters, we don’t announce your name over the intercom. It usually happens late at night, often to a poor, unsuspecting traveler who stumbles in after a horrendous day of travel (which may or may not have included getting bumped from a flight). It’s a nasty way to treat a guest, and hotels try to compensate by paying for the room at another hotel. And being really, really nice when they return. If they return.

Like airlines, hotels overbook to maximize revenues, banking on no-shows. We have revenue managers whose responsibility is to eke every possible dollar out of each room. This is not the person you want to talk to when you’re looking for a deal.

Understandably, a relocated guest can be a very nasty person. In overbooking situations managers pore over the arrivals list, trying to guess who will show and who won’t, and assign rooms accordingly. As guests arrive the available rooms diminish, and stress levels climb. It’s usually the poor, sleep-deprived night staff who have to deal with relocates, even though they are rarely responsible for overbookings.

As night manager at the Pan Pacific, I made a calculated risk that a family of eight from Dubai wasn’t going to show. So I gave their 3 suites to a group of businessmen who looked like they’d eat me alive if I relocated them. As I was handing them their keys, announcing to their applause that they had all been upgraded to suites, the Dubai family arrived. An altercation ensued in which the family demanded their rightful suites. Eventually, the businessmen prevailed, and the family was relocated. They were so abusive I had to call security for protection.

The trick with relocating is to send the guest to a hotel that is nice enough that she won’t be even further outraged, but not so nice that she will never return to your hotel. But sometimes the city is so booked you have little choice. In the past I’ve had to relocate people to distant suburbs. Try telling a guest he’s being relocated from a luxury downtown hotel to a remote highway motel.

Years ago, at the Harbour Castle Westin in Toronto a computer “glitch” resulted in an overbooking of 150 rooms. We set up tables at the hotel entrance so that guests couldn’t even get inside before they were relocated. The entire executive committee occupied these tables, which I thought was pretty impressive, particularly because that meant I didn’t have to do it.

Of course, at Opus we never relocate. Okay, almost never.

Last week we relocated a guest due to a late-night plumbing problem, but he was very understanding, and came back the next day. Last year, a guest’s dog got sick all over a room just prior to checkout. The dog was just a tiny thing, but the stench was so overwhelming it could have been an elephant. Housekeeping steam-cleaned the carpet several times over, but the odor persisted. Colin, our guest services manager, furiously reassigned rooms as one by one our guests arrived. By 2:00am we were down to one arrival and one smelly room. Colin prayed this last guest would no-show. But in walked the happy couple – direct from their wedding reception.

As a sidenote, the owner of this subversive little dog (pictured above, the chubby, guilty-looking one on the left) belonged to our former general manager, David Curell, who was back for a visit. He’s now at Hotel Vitale in San Francisco. Apparently they’re not pet-friendly at Vitale.

Normally we never relocate guests celebrating a special occasion, but they don’t always tell us this at time of reservation. A couple we relocated last year was celebrating the husband’s 50th birthday. They were enormously upset when we relocated them to the Four Seasons. I called the husband the following Monday to make amends, and was mortified when he accused us of relocating them because they were “too old”. There must have been a pretty young crowd in the lounge that night. I sent them a gift certificate for a return stay, but they haven’t come back yet.

Tonight looks promising for a perfect fill. We’re sitting at “0″: 58 rooms occupied and 38 arrivals. If there are no cancellations, no unexpected stayovers and no no-shows, we’ll have a perfect fill.

Let’s hope no wedding couples arrive unexpected in the wee hours of the morning.