less than other segments and has largely recovered.20 For example, both occupancy and room rates in the Ritz-Carlton and the Four Seasons increased significantly during 2004, and luxurious concierge floors were increasingly popular.21
LUXURY SERVICE
Since the crisis of the late 1980s, service has become the watchword of the hotel industry as a whole, as a significant source of distinction and profits. Rejecting the old philosophy of “heads in beds,” according to which the objective was simply to sell room nights to any client, hotels now devote significant attention to who is sleeping in the bed and how the hotel can maximize its profit from that particular customer over the long term. Yet service is defined differently in distinct industry segments. In luxury, it takes the form of extensive personalization; needs anticipation, legitimation, and resolution, including a willingness to break rules; unlimited physical labor; and deferential, sincere workers.
“They Zero in on You”: Personalization
Consistent with the luxury hotel's emphasis on distinctiveness, service in these hotels is highly personalized.22 First and foremost, managers and workers literally recognize the guest; consistent name use is one of the main tenets of service at any luxury hotel. The Luxury Garden's first service standard, for example, was “recognize guests personally through the use of their name, naturally and appropriately.”23 Management in both my sites encouraged workers to learn not only guests’ names but also the names of their children or pets. (Another dimension of luxury service, of course, is to know when the guest prefers not to be recognized, at moments when he might want privacy or would be embarrassed at being acknowledged by staff.)24
Workers customize contact in other ways as well. To individualize their conversations with first-time guests, workers use information they already have or whatever they can glean. They might remember where the guest dined the previous night or that he is in the city for the first time. Or they might wish him a happy birthday or a happy anniversary. Luxury hotels also mark special occasions by providing complimentary champagne or other amenities.
For frequent guests, personalization goes even further. Workers greet returning guests on arrival with “welcome back.” They remember details about guests’ lives, families, and preferences. Upscale hotels devote significant energy to gathering and acting on information about the desires of repeat guests, including the type of room they want, particular services they require (such as ionizing the room to purify the air or not using chemicals when cleaning), special requests for blankets or pillows, favorite newspapers, and food preferences. These hotels also keep track of guest conditions such as alcoholism and diabetes in order to avoid offering inappropriate amenities.
Beyond customizing these basic elements of the guest's stay (some of which are also noted in nonluxury hotels),25 the staff of upscale hotels observe preferences spanning a wide and unpredictable range. At the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Hong Kong, for example, a frequent guest's toy monkey always awaits her on the bed; in another Hong Kong hotel, workers iron one guest's shirt near his door “because he likes the feeling of warm cloth when dressing in the morning.”26 One repeat guest at the Royal Court required that a rented red Jaguar convertible be waiting when he checked in; another guest insisted on always being addressed as “Doctor.” A guest at the Luxury Garden requested that laundry workers avoid putting starch in his clothes; another demanded that the head of his bed be elevated six inches off the ground; still another thought of a particular chair as “his” (he had reportedly carved his initials on it) and requested that it always be in his room when he was staying in the hotel.
Sometimes preferences are observed as a result of the guest's explicit request, as in the examples above. Yet luxury service also means fulfilling preferences when the guest has not explicitly articulated them. One manager at the Luxury Garden said that for him, luxury service was exemplified by a housekeeper's noticing that a guest had eaten a peanut butter cookie provided for him one evening but had left the chocolate chip one untouched; the next night she left him two peanut butter cookies. In fact, workers there were given forms to record any guest preferences they became aware of, to keep them on file for future stays. A Royal Court standard of the week exhorted workers hotelwide to “please tell the front desk anything you know to put in the guest history.”
Many luxury hotels use additional strategies to recognize repeat customers. Some offer frequent guests gifts to mark significant stays (such as the fifth, tenth, twentieth, and so on). Often these emphasize the guest's individuality, such as personally monogrammed stationery at the Luxury Garden and monogrammed pillowcases at the Ritz-Carlton and the Peninsula Beverly Hills.27 These hotels even make major structural modifications in order to meet the needs of repeat guests. For example, one Ritz-Carlton hotel installed a wood floor in a room for a frequent guest who was allergic to carpeting.28 The Royal Court provided a shower curtain for Ms. Parker, a frequent visitor who did not like the open shower in the recently renovated bathrooms.
Research suggests that personalized attention is indeed an important element of creating customer loyalty. One industry study found four factors related to recognition, personal attention, and customized service to be among the top eight factors (of eighteen) that clients said engendered loyalty to a particular hotel; 87.5 percent of clients surveyed rated “the hotel uses information from your prior stays to customize services for you” as either 6 or 7 on a 7-point scale of important factors (with a mean rating of 6.4). The factors “the staff recognizes you by name” and “the staff recognizes you when you arrive” achieved a mean score of 5.6.29 Other research has identified personal attention and recognition as two of the three factors determining the choice of a hotel brand.30 Marketing research reveals that affluent frequent travelers in particular look for recognition by name and, in making reservations, “a direct line to the general manager, who inquires about a recent family triumph or tragedy, as any old friend would do.”31
Most guests I interviewed likewise described personal attention as important to them. Many enjoyed being called by name; Christina, a young leisure traveler, appreciatively told me that at a Four Seasons hotel the staff had remembered not only her name and her husband's but also the names of her two dogs. Tom, a business traveler, had been “dumbfounded” when his preferences were observed at another Four Seasons hotel; upon arrival, he had received plain strawberries instead of chocolate-covered ones, because on an earlier visit he had mentioned that he was “a low-fat eater.”
Guests appreciated being distinguished from others and having their personhood acknowledged, often describing this treatment in terms of “care” and feeling “at home.” Betty, a training consultant, preferred luxury hotels because, she said, “they treat you like you're a person” and “they respect me as a person.” Adam, a retired businessman, said of himself and his wife, “We feel [being called by name is] more a guest relationship and a human thing, that you're not simply a number or a unit. You're a person who is recognized and you can have a little conversation.” Andrew, the president of a major manufacturing firm, echoed these ideas: “I think that that changes the whole equation for the entire hotel, when somebody who's at the door in the lobby—there's at least a sense of recognition. If he doesn't know your name he might say—like if you are coming back from dinner, he says, ‘Did you have a nice evening this evening,’ like he really cares, ‘I care about you as a person.’”
By the same token, guests frequently complained if they did not get the personalized attention to which they felt they were entitled. On several occasions at both the Royal Court and the Luxury Garden, guests lamented, “No one here knows me anymore,” or asked, “What happened to everyone that knew me?” A frequent guest at the Royal Court complained that during the recent renovation “they destroyed my room.” One return guest at the Luxury Garden mentioned on a comment card that she felt “ignored” because the personalized stationery she and her husband received was always in his name.
A few guests I interviewed, all women, said they did not care if the staff used their names or appeared interested in their lives. They spoke of being “embarrassed” when they were treated this way, and they suspected that recognition was not authentic. These guests were more likely to consider recognition facilitated by technology