up luggage racks, and got ice for them if they wanted it. In the restaurants in both hotels, busers (often older immigrant men, known as “back servers”) not only offered bread at each table every few minutes (rather than simply leave a basket) but also served it using the complicated method of manipulating two spoons or two forks with one hand rather than employ a simple pair of tongs. Concierges at the Luxury Garden were required to handwrite elegant cards giving guests pertinent information about their dinner reservations; at the Royal Court, all messages were delivered to the guests’ rooms, so they did not have to call the operator. Inspired by the St. Regis in New York, some hotels offer the service of butlers, who will tidy guests’ rooms during the day, run their errands, and draw them a bath, among other tasks.38 Even some standard jobs, such as door attendant, function partly to indicate available human labor; automated technology is available, but the human touch is more luxurious. (Elevator operators and restroom attendants in other venues serve a similar function.)
Labor can also be demonstrated in the absence of workers. It is present in a variety of touches in the guest's room, in displays of labor that go beyond the typical folding of the toilet paper. At both the Royal Court and the Luxury Garden, for example, the guest's morning newspaper not only arrived in a fancy cloth bag that announced “Good Morning!” but was also hung carefully on the guest's door handle. The personalized stationery that awaited frequent guests in their rooms demonstrated labor, as well as serving the aforementioned purpose of customization. Andrew recalled that at a luxury resort, he and his wife had returned to their room to find a package adorned with an orchid awaiting them. Thinking it was a gift, they were surprised to find it was their laundry. Even objects in the room are indicators of labor, giving the sense that an invisible (caring) hand is constantly replacing bathrobes, slippers, ten or more different bathroom amenities, mountains of towels, fruit, fresh flowers, and so on.
Turndown service is an especially striking display of labor. Literally folding the corner of the bedding down, of course, serves no useful purpose; the gesture indicates, rather, that an invisible hand has been at work. Other elements of the elaborate turndown service in luxury hotels include switching on lights, turning on the radio, closing drapes, emptying trash baskets, cleaning the bathroom, replacing used towels, arranging the laundry bag and room service menu on the bed, and filling the ice bucket. At both hotels guests received, with their evening cookies, a card predicting the following day's weather; at the Royal Court, these were filled out by hand. These gestures primarily let the guest know that someone has been laboring on his or her behalf. As a butler at the St. Regis hotel told a reporter, “It's nice for the guest to see that the butler's been in.”39
Although they did not refer to it explicitly as such, guests I interviewed saw labor, both visible and invisible, as a key element of luxury service. Asked what they thought constitutes luxury service, they often invoked indicators of labor, speed, and eagerness to serve. Herbert defined luxury hotels in part as places where someone will “pop up to help unload your car and offer to put it away for you.” Bob, a young management consultant, said, “It's the little touches they do that impress me…. There's always a circle of people around you, and depending on how good the hotel is, it's either further away or closer to you and doing more or less for you.” Linda, a leisure traveler, was impressed that little boys were available outside her room all night at an Asian resort hotel if she and her husband wanted anything.
Many guests, in interviews and on comment cards to the hotel, approved of workers’ speed in tasks such as checking in, delivering room service or luggage to the room, or bringing their car from the garage. Mike, a businessman in his late thirties, mentioned speed of service as a difference between luxury and nonluxury hotels: “[Nonluxury hotels] are very bureaucratic in their handling. You know, you have to wait in line when you are checking in, even if you are a super-preferred kind of customer. The one that drives me completely nuts but is characteristic, particularly of the big convention [hotels], is that it takes twenty minutes to set up a wake-up call…. You know, room service takes an hour and a half to get there.”
Workers’ attitude about providing labor was considered important. Guests enjoyed getting the sense from them that “nothing is too much trouble,” characterizing luxury service as “can-do.” Virginia, who had stayed in a luxury hotel for three months because of damage to her home, described asking a worker for more dishes in her kitchenette: “If we were running low I would just ask her for—you know, ‘We need more glasses’ or something. In about three minutes we had an entire cabinet full of glasses. I wonder if we are demanding. But they never made you feel like you were asking them anything more than what they could willingly do for you…. They never batted an eye.” Kim told me, “It's nice when you forget your toothbrush or something. Just to call up and say, can I get one, and they bring it to you…. Like when they ask you, can they take your bags, whether you want it or not…. ‘I'll be happy to get that for you.’ If you need some aspirin or you need some—just really anything, they'll just bring it to your room as opposed to you having to get it.”
When workers withheld labor, guests often reacted unfavorably. Several people I interviewed and many hotel comment cards characterized as “bad experiences” episodes when they had to wait for staff or when dishes were not picked up around the hotel, and negative comment cards were full of criticism about failures of labor. One irate Luxury Garden guest wrote a letter complaining that the hotel's staff had disappointed him by, among other things, not providing the American cheese he preferred with his eggs and not offering to go out and buy him cigarettes when the hotel's gift shop did not carry his brand. (This was a failure of personalization and legitimation as well as one of labor, because his individual needs were not acknowledged.) I violated the code of unlimited labor when a couple staying at the Royal Court asked me to wrap flowers they had ordered for their room so they could take them home; I responded, “I'll deal with it,” prompting the man to comment to his wife (right in front of me), “‘Deal with it’—that makes it sound like a problem.”
Clients could also be extremely sensitive to transgressions of their own entitlement not to perform labor. For example, in 1999, the Luxury Garden placed cards in the bathrooms suggesting that clients who did not want their towels changed every day for environmental reasons hang them up, whereas if they did want them changed to leave them on the floor. The hotel received “a flood” of negative comment cards in protest, according to the general manager. He described the attitude that they communicated: “I pay top dollar, I shouldn't have to worry about this.” Andrew associated his own exertion of labor with a lack of intimacy: “When you're standing in line, I mean, it's a little colder, a little more matter of fact.”
Guests also interpreted labor exerted on their behalf as “personal” service. In telling me about a luxury resort in Asia, Andrew said:
The beach boys, they just almost hover around you. They put the towel around the pad on the beach [chair]. Of course, the first thing they ask you is if they can bring you a drink and you get that. They come around periodically with towels that have been soaked in some sort of smelling water, rose water, and put in the freezer, because it's so hot. And you kind of cool off with that. Again, it's a special personal service more than anything else. It isn't the size of the room, it is not the amenities. I mean, I don't think I've mentioned the word TV or VCR or that type of thing. It's the feeling of getting personal service.
Even objects communicate to the guests a sense of personalization, though they are also demonstrations of labor. Kim, a young business traveler, said of the bowl of fruit in the room, “It's as if they're saying, ‘Oh, we knew you were coming.’” To Mike, room amenities associated with frequent stays communicated, “We're glad you're back.” A guest of the Luxury Garden wrote on a comment card, “I am very impressed…. Very nice personal touches with the fruit and the bathroom facilities” (emphasis added).
While guests often appreciated the small touches in the hotel, they never described these as involving work. For example, Shirley liked a hotel where “apples would appear at one o'clock in the afternoon” (emphasis added). Instead, guests (like managers) often referred to these efforts as “attention to detail.” Asked what he liked about luxury service, Herbert responded: “Attentiveness to detail. They pay attention to small things. If you went into the dining room to get a newspaper at breakfast, they