What is the difference between a 'guest relations officer' and a 'guest service provider' in a five star hotel?

Ask the hotel chain who has those titles posted on their job board.

Employers define their needs, they divide up the work that needs doing to meet those needs into individual jobs, they define those jobs and the accountabilities that go with each . . . and they dream up the titles for them. And you do have some very dreamy people in this business.

That's why W Hotels is always looking for “Go anywhere, do anything” people -- that's an actual job title. This past month, a Hilton Garden Inn near where I live was advertising for “Happy Morning People” to serve breakfast. A desk clerk can be a “guest services agent”, a “guest services representative”, a “host” or “hostess” (a breakfast server can also be a “host” or “hostess”), the list goes on and it's not standardized for every hotel. Even Walmart refers to its employees as “associates”, as though being a low paid hourly “associate” at a high-pressure job adds dignity to it when you have to apply for food stamps to feed your kids because you can't do it on what they pay you.

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.)

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?

How do celebrities stay in hotels under assumed names?

By not renting the room or registering as a guest. (How to pull that off, and still get a hotel room? You get someone else to do it for you.)

During televangelist Jim Bakker's trial on federal charges in 1989, arising from the previous year's PTL club scandal, he suffered a breakdown and was sent by the presiding judge to a federal medical facility for several days' observation and evaluation. 

Tammy Faye followed along . . . and stayed at a hotel at which I was working, the Days Inn in Durham, North Carolina. 



This was arranged very much on the fly and, even so, security was tight. It had to be. The trial, and particularly Rev. Bakker's breakdown, was a badly sensationalized news story at the time. There was a lot of 'tabloid' interest in that case as it progressed. Morning disk jockeys were making Jim and Tammy Faye the butt of cruel jokes, and even regular TV news programs had broadcast a tearful, rather unflattering reaction to the events by Tammy Faye. 

Yet, it all went so well because it was elegantly simple. The best way to keep a secret is to not tell anyone.

Is the Tipton Hotel real, and where is it located?

That magical hotel in The Suite Life of Zack and Cody on the Disney Channel, that has a candy counter but doesn't have a front desk? 



(Except in a single episode, when the high-strung, video game-addicted general manager needed a surface about that height to be seen playing a computer video game on. So the set designers built one out of plywood with a coat of stain, even though it's supposed to be a luxury hotel? Well . . .  it's a comedy. And a relief from Hannah Montana if, back in the day, you had pre-teenage girls around who had to be be allowed to watch that every time it came on.)

No. This hotel obviously existed only so that two or three kids could live in it and experience adventures in it that can keep a TV series directed at kids stimulating, and for no other reason. Any place that unreal and mythical, any environment that artificial, needs to be shot on an closed set.

Notwithstanding the Boston location of the hotel in the story, they used the Fairmont Vancouver for the exteriors.

Originally appeared on Quora

Who are the modern tycoons of the hotel industry?

We don’t have that many tycoons. Hotels aren’t tech ventures: the returns on a good one are steady over years, but not quite as high. Only in my wildest dreams can I imagine ever owning a bunch of them outright.

Even Conrad Hilton and Bill Marriott expanded using outside investors, and Hilton and Marriott both came to follow more of a management company rather than ownership model. (Hilton brought cost accounting to it. Marriott brought a formula that had worked for some time for shopping centers and malls: build a hotel, then immediately turn around and sell it, but retain the management contract. You control the hotel, but you have others’ capital tied up in it, not your own . . .)