The triumph of everyday design

From Seth's Blog

The triumph of everyday design

Luxury goods used to be better. Better than the alternatives.

The best-made clothing, the best saddle, the most reliable luggage. The top of the market was the place people who cared needed to go to buy something that had the highest performance.

Today, though, a Toyota is a better car than a Bentley. More efficient, more reliable. The Vertus phone was a joke, and no one needs a $200 mouse when a $9 one is faster and easier to use.

I spent some time at a high-end hotel on a recent gig. The light switches were complicated and didn't work quite right. The door handle was awkward. The fancy faucets sprayed water on whoever was standing in front of the sink. All expensive, none of it very well-designed.

As materials have gotten cheaper and easier to find, it's design that matters. And the market is demanding better design--which is easy to copy and easy to improve.

Expensive is not the relevant metric, utility is. 

       

This isn't just a Starbucks disease

Many hotels are bad about it, too.

Business Insider article: Starbucks is quietly changing the business as furious baristas slam the 'cult that pays $9 per hour'

Observations:

We've seen this before: Management wants to micromanage the customer experience and leans too heavily upon 'service' and connection (which you can't force). Some even attempt to use it to cover inadequacies in the operation or facility itself. It makes any employee exposed to culpability for anything, and makes for a very unhealthy work environment.

No matter what the 'benefits' are, their value will show up as nebulous if you're not paying a living wage.

What are the oddest objects hotel staff have found left behind by guests?

This is a tricky question. In addition to the usual-usual - wallets (not a frequent occurrence because the guest needs his credit cards to check out, but it still sometimes happens, sometimes with a few hundred in cash inside), small jewelry items (usually, for some strange reason, a single earring, rarely both of a pair . . .), cell phones, cell phone chargers especially (I've said before, some guests are mutant aliens who eat TV remotes, but just as many try to make up for it just a little by leaving a cell phone charger behind), loose articles of clothing, small electronic items like an MP3 player, occasional loose food items (maybe a bottle of water or soda), toys (usually a stuffed animal, baby doll or teddy bear) - we're always finding weird things guests left behind . . .

• A guest's entire baggage - not quite, but almost, a complete wardrobe. Where it gets really odd is when they never call to reclaim it. It's like the guy walked out with the clothes on his back, and never looked back. You'd think we should consider filing a missing persons report, but we lack either standing or sufficient reason to believe something bad actually happened to him.
• A refrigerator full of food. Or beer. Or bottles of liquor, sometimes unopened.

On the day you check into your hotel the hot water fails. You have no choice but to stay at the hotel. What compensation would you expect?

It would depend entirely on the hotel.

A Hampton Inn would probably comp the room, but Hampton Inn's “100% satisfaction guarantee” policy is their choice, and it's not binding on other hotels. Every hotel has its own policies on the matter.

Absent some state or local law on the matter, requiring compensation in a situation like that (and stipulating precisely how much would have to be done to put things right with the guests), it would have to be negotiated with the hotel's management.

Because in a situation like that, each guest would be affected differently, we would plan on negotiating it individually guest by guest. On the one hand we can't be responsible for consequential damages, because we never can never foresee or control what those might be for any one person. On the other hand, while we may have to plan on making a few adjustments and even comping some rooms, and we'll want to do the right thing as much as possible, by as many people as we can; some guests might not have even noticed it was a problem, and not look into making any claim at all.

Doing it that way involves applying a little more triage than it's polite to notice, or than we would like to admit that we apply; but that's about the size of it.

What is the actual average length of time (in minutes) for hotel check-in and check-out?

It depends on the hotel and the amount of paperwork involved. 


 
Assuming minimal interaction with the guest, no problems with room availability or the reservation at check-in, and no problems with a bill or guest complaint at check-out; I'd say that 2-3 minutes for a check-in, about half that much for a check-out, is doable.
 
This is what I could shoot for at a well-run Choice or Best Western property.

Originally appeared on Quora

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.



One surprising example of divergence that we noted in developing our new economy brand (Calico Inns - Beechmont Hotels Corporation ): Red Roof Inn is an existing 'economy' brand. The last one at which I stayed, in Bethlehem, Pa., was a 'two-star' hotel - but it had a TripAdvisor bubble score of 4.0 out of 5.0. (Okay, I helped - Every town needs a 'good, $65.00 motel' . . . - but it still had four bubbles before I posted my own review. If anything, I penalized them: I gave them fives in every relevant category, but took one away on the final score for going "100% non-smoking" and not having a smoking room for me on my last trip.) 

Why does it take so long to check in at hotels? (It seems like they should just need to swipe a credit card and maybe check your id, but the person behind the desk ends up hitting keys on the computer for 5-10 minutes sometimes. What are they doing?)

This is what the check-in screen on a typical hotel computer looks like. And on most of those, nearly all the fields are required . . .

And that's on a good system. At least it . . .

What is my best bet to find nice hotel rooms, as opposed to "simply average" hotel rooms?

Check TripAdvisor. People on TripAdvisor are generally pretty candid about what they think of a hotel and its rooms. And while in the past, it has been criticized for giving inadequate protections to hotels from malicious reviews (by employees of competitors, or people who never stayed at a certain hotel), TripAdvisor now has enough of a critical mass of users, and generally enough safeguards in place against fraud and blackmail, that nowadays, it can be counted upon for a pretty fair description.



I hope you don't find this answer disappointing, that you weren't counting on, say, some inside information that only people in the industry have access to to make such determinations. 

But really - we use TripAdvisor, too (often to 'spy' on each other, see what our competitors have that we need to get, what they are doing that we need to be doing) . . . It also tells us, out of all the stuff we try, what guests actually respond to.

Arriving early to a hotel, I often hear "your room is not ready yet." Do hotels reserve you a particular room or do patrons simply have a spot in the hotel reserved for them?

We have a certain number of spots - rooms - reserved for a certain number of guests, and one of them is you.

As for the bad news, "your room is not ready yet" . . . Is it your own darn fault?  You'd be amazed at how frequently it could be!



We tell people (or we're supposed to tell them, although rushed desk clerks taking reservations, or reservations agents, frequently forget to mention it, or people don't read it on the webpage when making their reservation...), check in time is at 3:00.  

What time do people begin arriving?  That's right -- whenever they show up . . . wanting to be checked in to their room right away . . . 

But the housekeepers need that much time to clean the rooms from the night before.  (This is also the root of the flipside of the same problem - people overstaying checkout: Michael Forrest Jones' answer to How lenient are hotels when it comes to checking out late? )

Why does the housekeeping staff never put away the in-room ironing board and iron in US hotels?

I've never noticed this to be a problem.



The key here would be communication. I have no doubt that the room attendant would put it away if she were clear that that's what the guest wants. If she doesn't, it's probably because she thinks that a guest staying over wants it left be.

Originally appeared on Quora.

How often do hotel workers notice that their luggage carts are missing? How often do guests become upset when they are not available for use?

How often? All the flippin' time, and there's little anyone can do about it. It's one of the crosses to bear in this business (like little old ladies calling the desk in the middle of the night to complain that the guest in the next room is noisy, but when you go up to check, there's not a sound coming from the 'offending' room). 

All you can do is try to keep enough carts around (you should have two for the first fifty rooms, plus one more for each additional fifty rooms). But no matter how many you have (and they are surprisingly expensive, by the way -- even a 'cheap' one runs about $600-700 -- which is why a lot of hotels tend to skimp on them, or keep them around after they've obviously been worn out more than ten times over), when they're gone, they're gone.



And yes, guests do become upset when they need a cart and none are available, but we can't make them reappear by magic.

What does it take to run a successful hotel?

I could ask, 'define success'. Are you running a Motel 6 on an I-80 offramp in Podunk, Kansas; or are you going to go all out with mega-luxury, rooms you can rent for $800 to $3000 per night, lots of meeting and banquet space, and a restaurant that people will fly in for; and give the St. Regis [http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel...] a run for it? It makes a difference. Usually. For this answer, I'll try to not let it.

Like my answer to What does it take to start a hotel?, this is one of those open-ended questions that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, but for the fact that someone of the caliber of David S. Rose was doing the asking (which could work into a great leap forward for my company if he should ever decide to stray outside tech ventures and into more real estate, "Main Street" businesses, and bricks and mortar-related stuff, and he likes my answers on the subject); because no answer anyone could give would come close to adequate.