Captive audience syndrome

Those of us engaged in marketing independent hotels spend a huge amount of time and money enticing people to go off the beaten track and discover new places. Once snared, hoteliers and their teams then make similar efforts to encourage them to make repeat stays by creating lovely environments and giving great hospitality.

Just to give one example, The Nare Hotel in Cornwall now offers the use of a beautiful motor launch to explore the local coast and the Helford River, with extremely civilised catering on board. The hotel traded perfectly well before, but the owners wanted to add yet another way to delight their guests so went to the trouble and expense of finding the perfect vessel. It’s a long way from the Home Counties so customers must be tempted to make the journey and, critically, to want to return again.

How very different things are in key locations, where demand is driven purely on need rather than desire; hotels bang next door to large exhibition centres, airports or large train stations, for example. At some of these properties (by no means all) the management focus seems to be entirely upon squeezing every last drop of profit from the luckless guest, who is there only because he or she has to be.

In these ghastly insults to our trade you may expect to find a long slow queue at check-in, depressing décor, tiny showers with the cheapest wafer of soap and a scratchy towel, grim stain-friendly carpets that scream out “WEAR SLIPPERS HERE IF YOU VALUE YOUR PODIATRY HEALTH” and a low grade TV screen showing an ever so personal message, like the “Welcome Mr PHANCOX” which greeted my arrival at a Midlands venue one evening last year.

Having a captive audience like this brings out the worst in companies which own and manage monstrosities that dare to call themselves hotels. I feel genuinely sorry for the teams working in them and suspect staff turnover is much higher than elsewhere. Where is the pride in serving up the bare minimum to grumpy customers who’d much rather be at home?

Last month we held an event at The Goring in London, one of the finest establishments in the world. Unfortunately for our guests, the hotel was full so those needing an overnight stay had to make do with what they could get near Victoria at short notice. One of them told me she had asked to be moved to another room, then another, then another until she finally found one with acceptable cleanliness. The attitude of the receptionist was of the ‘take it or leave it’ variety, safe in the knowledge that no amount of complaints would stem the constant flow of new victims requiring accommodation, simply due to location. It is the equivalent of travelling on the tube in rush hour.

What effect, if any, does this have on the rest of us? My personal fear is that exposure to the worst kinds of hotels actively discourages people from wanting to work in our industry as a whole, in the same way that a prison visit might cause one to rethink committing a serious crime. We have enough of a challenge recruiting these days without reinforcing the wholly false perception that all jobs in hospitality involve poorly paid drudgery.

The crazy thing is that despite penny pinching in every possible area, hotels like this seem happy to splash out limitless amounts on commission to OTAs. Perhaps they do not recognise this as a cost?

I mean no offence to the hard working individuals who keep these businesses going, many will be among the thousands of admirable men and women upon whom our industry relies. But I do hope that greater transparency, made possible by social media, will force operators to address some of the shortcomings in both the fabric and the atmosphere of these carbuncles. Just because a location is popular does not mean standards should be ignored.

This article first appeared in the July 2017 issue of Hotel Owner