be real flowers, and there aren't going to be a bunch of petals lying on the table next to it.” Everything this guest mentions involves labor, but he does not acknowledge that. Instead, he perceives these practices as indicators of aesthetic attentiveness.
Labor involving interaction, as we have seen, is supposed to appear voluntary on the part of the worker; noninteractive labor is supposed to remain invisible. When a guest at the Royal Court requested that red rose petals be strewn about his room as a surprise for his girlfriend, for example, he probably did not imagine that Ginger and Inga would spend an hour or so methodically yanking the heads off the long-stemmed flowers. When “invisible” labor was made apparent, guests often became uncomfortable. As one guest I interviewed, Sally, said, “I expect not to be bothered…if they want to turn down the beds, just make sure I'm not there.” Here she indicates not only that labor must remain invisible but also that she prefers to imagine that the workers turned down the beds because they desired to rather than because it was their job. If the occupants were in the room when the turndown attendant knocked on the door, they almost always requested that she come back later or refused the service altogether. On the couple of occasions I witnessed in which the guests allowed the housekeeper (and me) into the room, they stood around awkwardly waiting for her to finish the service. (These were also the only occasions when I saw turndown attendants receive tips.) As I wrote in my notes after one of my first turndown shifts, “Most people were pretty nice but a tiny bit irritated at being interrupted. It's weird because it's a fine line—we are trying to do something nice for them, but it only works if it's done in kind of a mysterious way. If not, then we are just bothering them.”
“They Really Care”: Deference and Sincerity
Luxury service is not only about what workers do; it is also about how they do it. As the examples I have given indicate, workers in my research sites were required to demonstrate a range of emotions in their demeanor. First, they had to display deference to guests. They had to call guests “Mr. X,” for example, while guests used workers’ first names. Workers were also required to smile at guests, regulate their own appearance, and allow guests to initiate and terminate interactions, thereby occupying a “subordinate service role.”40 The deference imperative also inheres in the more elaborate strategies of legitimation and unlimitedness I have mentioned. Managers told workers, “There is no right or wrong, only the guest's perspective.” Second, as I have shown, workers were required to display enthusiasm, appearing eager to exert labor on guests’ behalf. As Arlie Hochschild wrote of flight attendants, “Seeming to love the job becomes part of the job.”41
Most important, however, was that workers appear sincere in their concern for guests. The Royal Court's service handbook directed workers to “show genuine care and concern for guests’ needs.” One Luxury Garden service standard instructed workers to “engage guests with eye contact and a warm, sincere smile.” Alice, the training manager at the Luxury Garden, told workers that guests need to perceive “that you care, that you care I [the guest] am here, and you're going to do your best to make sure I'm happy…. [Guests] need to know they can trust you to do what they need.” Managers also encouraged workers to see guests as dependent, casting them as tired after traveling or as disoriented in a new city and therefore deserving of sympathy.
Guests also identified genuine care as a central part of luxury service.42 Betty said, “I guess the biggest thing is, people want your stay to be comfortable, and they don't just say that. They really do.” She immediately gave the example of doormen allowing her to leave her car at the curb instead of parking in the garage, as would have been required in a less upscale hotel; for her, genuine care was related to the sense of breaking rules and accommodating needs. As he approached the front desk, an older guest at the Royal Court said to Jasmine and me, “What perfect smiles! That's a real smile, right?”
Some guests contrasted sincerity to routinized interaction, which they viewed with distaste. As Adam put it, “I think good service begins at the front desk…. With a welcome that seems sincere…where people look at you, look you in the eye, instead of looking down at the computer and handing you a card without even looking at you. That ticks me off.” Herbert commented, “In a first-class hotel, the staff that works there generally looks you in the eye when they walk by you in the hall. And when someone comes up and asks you, ‘Is there anything I can get for you?’ or ‘Are you enjoying your stay?’ they look you right in the eye, and they're really asking that question as opposed to saying that ‘I have to walk into the lobby at an eighteen-minute interval and see if anybody wants anything.’” Martha, whose computer had been stolen at a midrange hotel, compared the distant reaction of the workers there with the more genuine response she imagined she would have had at a luxury property:
It was really sort of an upsetting event. And I thought the difference, in retrospect, between if my computer had been stolen in the lobby of the Four Seasons as opposed to the [Hotel X], the people at the Four Seasons would have been, like, slashing their wrists! [Laughs.] You know? And the people at the [Hotel X] were like, “Well, our insurance is five hundred dollars, and that's it.” So, it's a difference.
By the same token, guests did not like workers to be overly formal or aloof. As Shirley put it when describing a hotel she had not enjoyed, “There was a formality there where I didn't feel welcomed in any kind of intimate way…. It was a coolness.” Violations of the sense of authenticity, as well as a sense of rote behavior, rupture the guest's sense that her individual self is being recognized.
MOTHER OR SERVANT? CARE AND SUBORDINATION
Horst Schulze, the former president of Ritz-Carlton, described the findings of a study his company had conducted on guest desires: “The first results that came back said that the guests wanted to feel at home, but I didn't believe that. So we did a further study and found out that what they really wanted was to feel like they did when they were in their mother's house.” Gilbert explains, “This meant that they wanted an environment where nothing went wrong: light bulbs didn't blow out and food wasn't burnt.”43 Schulze might more accurately have spoken of a fantasy mother's house, of course, as few real mothers can provide an environment where nothing goes wrong. Like an idealized mother, the luxury hotel provides a sense of nurture, noting all individual preferences and quirks, anticipating and fulfilling needs, and showering the guest with genuine care and unlimited labor. As we have seen, this is largely what guests value in their hotel experience.
By the same token, luxury service also involves some of the elements of paid “care work” as it is defined in the literature on socially necessary work, such as child, health, and elder care.44 As a home health care aide defined good care, for example, “It's not always the clean bed, it's not always some food or medication, but it's a smile or I'll get that for you or I'll do that for you.”45 In fact, many of the intangible components of care that compose luxury service are precisely those that are eliminated in the rationalization of other kinds of care, especially elder and health care.46 In the hotel, however, these components are a primary source of profit—they differentiate a hundred-dollar room from a four-hundred-dollar room—and management thus emphasizes them through standards and rewards. Using standards, managers make explicit the components of care that are mystified in family settings or characterized as an intuitive “mother's wit” in nursing homes.47 They also encourage workers to develop ongoing relationships, often seen to characterize care, with frequent guests.48
But there is, of course, a crucial difference between hotel workers and these other kinds of workers. Mothers have power over children, and even workers in traditional caring occupations exert some authority over their physically or emotionally dependent charges, who are usually children or elderly or infirm adults. But hotel workers lack this power, at least explicitly. Indeed, their relation to guests is in many ways more analogous to that between domestic servants and their employers than to the relation between mothers and children or paid caregivers and other kinds of dependents. Two kinds of racialized, gendered domestic servant tropes are relevant here: the female servant of color who typically does housework and sometimes child care, and the butler (or valet), usually a white man performing personal and household services.
The image of the butler connotes professional,