Does your cat meow back to you when you talk to it?

My two cats don’t, but some do.

I’ve had cats that did. And I could introduce you to one that does.

This is Sally. She’s the official mascot at the Brookstown Inn in Winston-Salem, N.C., one of my favorite hotels in the area. I was doing some work for them a year and a half ago, and we’ve ‘spoken’ quite a few times.

The Historic Brookstown Inn - Timeline

Sally is a hotel cat, and the almost perfect hotel cat at that.

(One of the things The Algonquin in New York is famous for — besides the Round Table and the $10,000 martini — is an even more famous hotel cat, Matilda. She gets lots of fan mail — the hotel g.m.’s administrative assistant and ‘chief cat officer’ helps her out with answering it, since she ‘doesn’t have thumbs and can’t hit the space bar’ — she has her own Facebook page, and they have a big birthday party for her every year in the ballroom.)

The terminology

Thanks, Anthony (Timeline Photos - Anthony Melchiorri | Facebook ). This could be the start of something big once we keep adding to it and linking back to it.

Some terms are industry jargon, others are specific to a particular brand or chain.

Contributions are welcome.





'Bucket': A vertical file, with a tabbed divider for each room in the hotel, into which the registration sheet that you signed is stored until you check out. In the days before computers, when this was a much more useful piece of equipment, it was also the repository for your bill (see folio).

What are some good questions to ask a customer service candidate in an interview?

Define 'service'.

(This assumes you use your interview process to not only acquaint your applicant with your company culture, and what the expectations are like, etc., but to actually get to know him or her in a meaningful way, as well . . .)

You do encounter a lot of people in this business who like to see that Wind-up Barbie Doll 'Service Personality' With The Beaming Pan-Am Smile - and accordingly, you do have applicants show up with the notion that that's what'll be expected of them and that's what they should try to project. (It only shows that applicants and experienced managers alike have a pretty screwed up idea of what 'service' is all about.)

Let's start by defining what service is not. Service is not self-demeaning. It's not self-deprecating. It's not sycophancy. It's not inauthentic. It's not dressing up your staff in an organ grinder's monkey vest or a fake, cheap tux. It's not using scripted customer greeting: you don't 'make the guest feel welcome' by manipulating the guest.

Where did all those clowns come from?

I keep Bozo around when I want to bust on a hotel chain or franchise organization . . . Figure, if I'm going to use one as a punching dummy, they may as well look the part.




Michael Forrest Jones' answer to Business Travel: How far should hotels go to please and appease dissatisfied or unhappy guests?

Are hotel reviews more relevant in the buying process than the categorization by hotel stars?

Think of it as the difference between the Emmys and the People's Choice Awards.

The 'stars' are ratings based upon the hotel's service and amenity level - you have to have a free continental breakfast to get this many stars, you have to have a restaurant and lounge to get that many stars, you have to have room service to get one more. Michelin, AAA, and anyone else who awards 'stars' each has their own criteria re how many 'stars' to award for which set of amenities: they're their stars to give, and they make the rules and give them out as they please (Hotel rating ). If I want to develop a new 'four-star hotel', I'm going to make sure I plan ahead for my new hotel to have everything on those lists of requirements for a four-star rating.

The reviews by guests on TripAdvisor are submitted by guests (hopefully real guests, not sales staff - Michael Forrest Jones' answer to What's the best site for getting hotel reviews? ), and based on their experience staying at the hotel.

How do online travel agencies offer such low hotel prices?

They don't. We do. It comes out of our hide. Online travel agencies charge high commissions to the hotels.

Booking.com charges 20%. Hotels.com, Travelocity, Expedia, Priceline and others charge between 22 and 25%. And that's if you have a franchise affiliation and let your franchise organization negotiate it for you.

And those are the ones where you -- the consumer -- don't get that much of a bargain. A contract between a hotel and an online travel agency provides for 'rate parity': each OTA wants a promise from the hotel that the rate provided to it is the lowest publicly available rate, and provides stiff penalties to the hotel if a lower rate is found elsewhere. Likewise, every franchise organization offers some version of a 'Best Internet Rate Guarantee', and holds their franchisees to it. (I should have listened to my dad and made it my goal to go to Duke Law when I was a kid: I smell a lucrative opportunity here for a mass tort lawyer to file a class action suit on antitrust and price fixing claims . . .). Since the 'lowest publicly available rate'/'Best Internet Rate' can only be one number, and that number can't be any lower and still be either the 'lowest publicly available rate'/'Best Internet Rate' ; what you pay on any of those websites is going to be very close to the hotel's 'Best Available Rate', the rack rate (see Michael Forrest Jones' answer to What is and why do hotels have a rack rate? )

Why are hotels expensive even in developing countries? (Relative to rent and cost of living.)

Because most hotels - at least, those built by American or European countries - are built to American or European standards (or, to be fair, the standards that prevail in the world's most advanced nations).

You're not going to go to a developing country and skimp or cut corners or take shortcuts on building codes, building materials, furnishings, or fire codes or fire safety in building a hotel there. If something went wrong, it could go very badly for you, at the very least in terms of public relations. Or, if you furnished it on the cheap or used cheap materials, your property would within a few years stick out as less than your other properties and give your entire group a bad name. 

 

You'll want to offer the same furnishings and amenities, because that's what your customer base (and without a pretty good idea who the customer base is going to be, I won't even buy or build in the next town, never mind a developing country) counts upon you for and expects to see when they arrive, so you don't want it unraveling.