Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

“we don't have clientele that count pennies,” so monetary compensation when something went wrong was less meaningful to them. Sebastian, the general manager, told me in an interview that guests were most likely to complain that “their needs weren't met” and that “they weren't heard.”

      Guests value worker responsiveness to their needs and problems, seeing it as a key dimension of luxury service. For example, one guest at the Luxury Garden wrote in a letter to the general manager, “Antonio [the guest services manager] and his staff were extremely courteous and helpful when we needed to locate our lost luggage. I am sure that we seemed very high maintenance at one point when several calamities occurred at once. But Antonio and his people never complained nor seemed in any way reticent to attack each challenge as it arose.” Asked in an interview what he meant by “caring service,” Herbert invoked both recognition of needs and their legitimation, as well as personalization:

      When you're in the hotel and you order room service and—because I get up early, and I make a motion to the room service waiter that my wife and son are still asleep in the next room. The next morning the same waiter comes and delivers the breakfast and taps so quietly on the door I almost didn't know he was there because he noticed—that's sort of a very concrete example. He really did care that he didn't want to wake them and knew I wanted to have coffee in the morning, and that's really legitimate.

      Guests also see it as a failure of service when workers do not acknowledge their problems. Christina described a stay at a hotel where “everything” had gone wrong; among other things, she and her husband were given a room much smaller than the suite they had reserved. She said, “If they had put flowers in the small room or a fruit basket or whatever, all would have been forgiven, but we were totally ignored.”³⁵ Shirley described a bad experience in which the staff upgraded her but did not respond to her complaint that the room smelled musty: “They kind of pooh-poohed my concern and acted as if I wasn't being appreciative enough of the upgrade.” Here staff failed to legitimate the guest's need, assuming that the bigger room would be more important to her than the odor.

      Legitimation of guests’ needs carries another dimension: a sense of unlimitedness. The imperative to “never say no to a guest” is a mantra in luxury hotels. Check-in and check-out times were rarely enforced at the Luxury Garden, for example; if a guest decided to stay another night, he was not refused, even if that meant overbooking the hotel. One manager told me that imposing these rules would violate “five-star service,” especially given the rates guests were paying. The general manager at the Royal Court stressed several times in an all-employee meeting that “the guest needs to be able to get anything he wants.” He said, “We can't let rules get in the way,” berating the staff for turning a guest away from the restaurant because he had arrived five minutes late for breakfast. “For four hundred dollars,” he said sarcastically, “we should be able to find a piece of bacon somewhere in this building.”

      Guests approved of this idea that rules could be bent or broken for them, and they often saw a willingness to transgress as a defining feature of luxury establishments in contrast to midrange hotels. One couple wrote a comment card to the Luxury Garden praising the hotel for providing breakfast at 10:30 P.M. On comment cards, several guests at both hotels lauded the chef for making vegetarian meals available. Tom, after citing an instance in which a Four Seasons had accommodated his request for a special meeting room, said of luxury hotels, “You just don't have problems. You just don't hear about rules and stuff—you know, they solve [problems]. They basically do everything humanly possible in these nicer hotels to meet whatever you want and make it a wonderful stay for you and your family.” Betty, the consultant, described her experience:

      If I ask—like the Ritz-Carlton in Boston is one of my favorite hotels, and if I ask for something there they'll do whatever they need to do to fix it, to accommodate me. But if I would go to, say—I was staying in some [nonluxury] place in Washington about four months ago and all I needed was some pens for my room and I got an argument at the desk…. You know they're not going to go out of their way for anything unless you have an argument with them, and that bothers me…. [In luxury hotels] you don't hear, “We don't do it that way,” or “We can't do it that way,” or “We don't have that here,” that kind of thing.

      Again, the guest is given the sense of unlimited entitlement in the fulfillment of her needs.

       “Pampering”: Displays of Labor

      Another key element of luxury service, though it is not explicitly acknowledged as such either in the industry or among hotel guests, is the guest's entitlement to workers’ physical labor—what some guests refer to as “pampering.” Thorstein Veblen saw both abstention from labor and consumption of the labor of others as markers of the leisure class.³⁶ He would not have been surprised to find that guests in the luxury hotel are entitled both to avoid working themselves and to benefit from the unlimited labor of workers. But this available labor is not only physical; it also has an emotional dimension, indicating “care” to guests, just as a mother's preparation of dinner indicates love for her family.³⁷ I call these offerings “displays of labor”; they can involve visible human work or simply markers of labor.

      Many of the available services and explicit standards of the luxury hotel involve lavishing visible labor upon the guest. Both the Luxury Garden and the Royal Court, for example, offered packing and unpacking services on request. One of the service basics at the Luxury Garden insisted that all guests receive an amenity upon arrival, which “must be personally presented and not simply pre-set in the room.” Standards at both the Luxury Garden and the Royal Court demanded that workers “escort guests” to their destinations within the hotel. (At hotels such as the Four Seasons, even animals are entitled to consume human labor; room service is offered to guests’ dogs.) Available labor also inheres in the speedy service that characterizes the luxury hotel. The timely delivery of food or freshly pressed laundry indicates that plenty of people are ready and willing to meet the guest's needs.

      Managers encourage workers to use “proper verbiage” regarding their efforts, such as “my pleasure” or “I'd be happy to,” which minimizes guest perception that human labor is being exerted. They must respond enthusiastically when asked to run any kind of errand, from renting camera equipment to picking up chocolates for a guest's wife. They must be willing to wait on the telephone while the guest ponders the room service menu, for example, or confers with her husband about what type of restaurant strikes his fancy for the evening. Workers are exhorted to respond personally and immediately to any guest complaints; even if these are not the worker's responsibility, she should never tell the guest to call some other department. More than once in employee training at the Luxury Garden, Alice recounted a cautionary tale of sitting in another luxury hotel's lobby and listening in horror as a caller looking for a lost briefcase was bounced around from front desk to concierge to bell desk to housekeeping.

      When management praises workers it is often for “going the extra mile.” Managers at the Luxury Garden, for example, on separate occasions rewarded a doorman who called a taxi company after a guest left something in a cab, a front desk worker who taped a basketball game on her home VCR for a guest, and a business center worker who ran with a guest's package to the Federal Express office late one afternoon so it could be sent that day. Management at the Royal Court lauded a bellman for assisting a guest with her luggage when she moved to another hotel several blocks away.

      A corresponding luxury service convention dictates that the guest himself should never exert any labor. At the Luxury Garden, for example, a manager who was training me said, “Never let guests fill out their own forms.” Workers checking guests in at both hotels often requested a business card to save guests the labor of filling out the registration card by hand. One of the service standards at the Luxury Garden dictated that employees should pass on information about guest problems to their coworkers, so that “the guests will not have to repeat themselves.” I was also told that “a guest should never touch a door.” And, of course, guests should never carry their own bags, and the time they wait for any service must be minimized. The prohibition on guest labor is another way to acknowledge the guest's high status and limited time, thus recognizing his entitled personhood.

      Tasks associated with certain jobs