However, business ideals then destroyed this vision of conviviality. The second originality of American hotels was their adoption of the methods of mass production. E. M. Statler (1863–1928) did for them what Henry Ford did for motor cars, reducing prices – ‘a bed and a bath for a dollar and half’ – by standardisation and strict instructions that employees had to memorise and follow exactly on pain of dismissal. Though some hotels became cheaper, others went the other way. When a thousand guests were looked after by 600 staff, efficiency became the first priority. Skyscraper hotels challenged the intimate atmosphere of small family ones. Hotel-keeping became a profession with graduate diplomas; hotel chains became profit centres, with just three corporations owning nearly two million rooms between them. The ‘hospitality industry’ was born. The commercialisation of hospitality, which monetised kindness, is another of the great revolutions in human relations. An era came to an end when a belief that prevailed in almost all civilisations was abandoned, that everyone had to offer a free bed and a meal, or several, to passing strangers.
The decisive change came when the American Hotel Plan, where the price of a room included meals eaten in common, gave way in the early twentieth century to the European Plan, which emphasised privacy, with à la carte meals taken and paid for separately. César Ritz (1850–1918), the son of a poor Swiss peasant, who rose from being an assistant waiter to owner and manager of some of Europe’s most prestigious hotels, patronised by royalty and the rich, replaced egalitarianism with luxury, thick carpets, gold taps, obsequious service and exclusivity. He said, ‘I want to teach people how to live.’ What he meant was that he was fascinated by an idealised vision of the habits and extravagance of the upper classes, thrilled by their self-assurance, and desperate to imitate them. So he created imitation palaces, allowing those who could afford it to parody aristocratic rituals of ostentatious opulence freed from the constraints of domestic realities. Posh hotels became 24-hour theatres, with staff playing the role of deferential minions, unquestioningly indulging their guests’ every whim. Ever since, the rich, middle and poorer classes have been segregated in separate hotels.
However, a hotel today is a United Nations in miniature, employing and hosting people from every part of the world. Could it be a more effective peace-maker? Does it have to be, in its expensive version, a fortress protecting its inmates from the rabble outside? Is there something it could learn from Dostoyevsky and his grim abode, the prison, which protected those who have never been prosecuted for their crimes from those who have, and which taught him so much about human contradictions? A year I spent with a team of four researchers interviewing the employees and guests of one chain of hotels was enough to reveal a great puzzle: there was an extraordinary amount and variety of talent, experience and knowledge among the employees, at all levels of the hierarchy, but the guests were never made aware of it. The chambermaids were often foreigners wanting to learn a new language, and some of them were graduates. The housekeeping staff included people training to be nurses; one barman was an accountant, another was studying for an MBA; a porter was the son of a chieftain in his own country; a receptionist was touring the world working in hotels to collect material for a novel. But the hotel’s ‘human resources’ database contained only the most banal information about them, just a few appraisals and complaints, assuming there was no point in going deeper, because hotels have the fastest turnover of staff of almost any business. Very occasionally, senior managers did make friends with guests, superficially or not, but guests seldom had the chance to benefit from the large numbers of staff they never saw, or passed by in silence. Staff were even officially discouraged from ‘fraternising’, because the dogma of ‘customer service’ haunted them. Hotels regard themselves as having strictly limited functions; they underestimate the capacities of their staff, and do not see themselves as proactively contributing something original to the expansion of the imaginations or the enrichment of the experience of those they shelter, those they employ and the city they serve. The commercial success of hotels has been paralleled by the narrowing of their social purpose.
Once upon a time the English pub had a central role in public, legal, military and social activity, as the location for numerous official events, but now only nostalgia sustains its claim to being the fount of national conviviality. Since 1800, England’s population has increased sixfold while the number of pubs remained constant, and the number is now falling fast; four thousand are expected to close this year. In one street in south London, the pubs have all disappeared and been replaced by six gambling shops. The pub is no longer the place that people go to for their important conversations, which, according to a survey by a brewer, take place instead at home with partners (74 per cent), or with work colleagues (57 per cent), friends (56 per cent), parents (38 per cent), rarely with the boss (11 per cent) and hardly at all with shop staff (2 per cent). Pubs do indeed attract more customers than the major churches have worshippers, but two-thirds of these customers say they are shy about starting a conversation with strangers in them, and many limit themselves to gossip, banter and trivial chat; they themselves declare that half of their conversations in pubs are pointless, and only 4 per cent last more than thirty minutes. The French bistro is likewise in steep decline; there were ten times more of them in 1900 than there are today; only a fifth of the population visits them regularly at least once a week, and only two-fifths consider them as having an important role in social relationships.
The Japanese inn, though also a national icon, is even less of a place for mutual discovery; on the contrary, it is cherished nostalgically as a relic that can reconnect the stressed workaholics of today with a past which is imagined to have been more stable and more conducive to the flowering of harmony and love. An inn dating back to A.D. 718, and run by the same family for forty-eight generations, is now an eight-storey concrete building able to house 450 people, but it is valued as a shrine where it is possible to take refuge from the pressures of globalised uniformity, revive historic memories, and construct, if only in imagination, a vision of a kinder and more beautiful existence with which one can identify. Self-discovery rather than discovery of others is the goal encouraged by the still vibrant tradition of Tabi, which originally meant a journey on foot into the wilderness to get away from human rivalries and jealousies, in the hope that communion with nature would help one to clarify one’s own true values. So today’s travellers can see a stay at an inn as a step into the past, reinforcing their vague desire to escape from the temptations of conventional success and regain their ancestors’ appreciation of hardship and uncertainty, the beauty of impermanence, and the sorrow of parting with people and places. Escape from the regimentation of organised tours remains the message of The Way to Walk the World, the favourite guide-book of independent travellers and datsu-sara (people who have ‘abandoned salary’), but it is escape from oneself and from hard reality to nowhere very definite.
Many people have therefore been creating their own alternative to the hotel, which they cannot afford and which they find too boring or constraining. Their goal is to meet people they do not know and see places that tourists do not visit. Hajj Sayyid, who walked around the world in the nineteenth century, now has many millions of successors doing the same. There is no contact between them and packaged tourists; governments can no more control them than they can make laws to order birds to leave their droppings only in appointed places; and urban planners, obliged to prioritise the needs of residents and businesses, have to try to forget that what brings life to a city, and what distinguishes a city from a dormitory, is the presence of strangers who are not searching simply for officially publicised sights. Tourism and travel are now the world’s fastest growing industry, providing one-tenth of all employment, contributing more to GDP than automotive manufacturing, but hotels continue to be ruled by out-dated assumptions, combined with a desperate search for immediate profit to compensate for the ever increasing cost of maintaining their appearances with mo
re fancy taps and fashionable décor. They have got stuck in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dream of rising in the social scale, becoming a ‘professional’ and living ever more luxuriously; they have difficulty in waking up from it because the legacy of mediaeval guilds, which jealously controlled entry into each speciality in each branch of artisan activity, still dominates today’s careers. Hoteliers now constitute a distinct profession, which means they must let other professions perform tasks they could very well do themselves; nobody wants to be like peasants of old, subject to the seasons, who in winter turned their hands to many productive activities quite different from agriculture.
So hotels have not yet discovered what to do with themselves in unfavourable seasons, even though some can have many empty rooms in slack periods and not be full even when they are supposed to be busiest. They do not need to limit themselves to supplying beds and meals. They do not need to believe twentieth-century consultants who preach ‘change’ as the road to salvation for business, but with change always heading for the same goals of profit and happiness, and every change therefore leading to yet another change, because they are never content that they have enough profit or happiness. The alternative to change is discovery, the difference being that discovery opens paths to hitherto unimagined goals. Technology understands what that means, but orthodox business wants predictable results. The explosion of tourism and the migration of labour are making hotels increasingly international, and multiplying the proportion of tourists whose purpose is not to wallow in luxurious beds, but to discover new people. There is an alternative to spending vast sums refurbishing hotels with more luxuries, so as to be able to increase prices, and that is to take more interest in the knowledge, imagination and ambitions of each individual tourist. Hotels now have the option of becoming intermediaries pioneering the creation of more profound and informed relationships between their guests, between their guests and the inhabitants of their city, and between the guests and the employees of the hotel. Just as the early American hotels helped to bring the migrants of their continent together through facilitating personal contacts, so hotels can, with comparable but different methods, make the world more aware of the variety, complexity and contradictions that are hidden by national and professional norms. There are global chains of hotels, but they do not fulfil global roles.
Hotel guests may occasionally talk to taxi drivers, but they rarely have memorable conversations with the chambermaids earning the minimum wage who clean their rooms. Their rooms are not prison cells, because they are free to go out as they please, but like convicts, they often do not know where to escape to. About half of the guests in the hotel chain I studied said they were kept fully occupied by their business in the city, and just wanted to be left alone, but half, having finished what they had come to do, or while waiting for appointments, had many empty hours to kill, and knew nobody they could visit; when accompanied, they said they would like to get to know local families; when alone they would welcome invitations to meet local professionals who might teach them something useful for their own occupation. Sitting in the lobby of their hotel, they had no means of knowing that just a few feet away there was another silent guest who shared their interests. The concierge could get them tickets for theatres and recommend shops or restaurants, but did not know enough about each guest or about each inhabitant of the city to suggest meetings that could well be more interesting.
Packaged tourism has made the masses aware of strange places, but also revealed the difficulties of appreciating them. In a Tunisian seaside resort, most hotel guests on holiday were too exhausted by their jobs to want to do anything more than rest, and never spoke to the locals; they went back knowing very little more about the country they had visited, while the locals who cleaned their rooms and served their meals felt insulted by their lack of interest. In Cancun, the guests of the two hundred hotels that have been built there know nothing of the eruption of as many slums hidden behind them, whose inhabitants complain that though tourism creates jobs and brings in money, four-fifths of the money tourists pay for their holiday goes to foreign operators, in a new kind of colonialism: ‘We are ruled from outside.’ Mass tourism has reached the limits of its inventiveness; people are not necessarily interested simply in escaping briefly from the realities of their own countries; there is not an infinite demand for resorts specialising in sex, drugs, casinos, alcohol, and a Westernised parody of foreign food. The Germans have coined a word to express the result: ‘free time stress’, Freizeitstress. The Orthodox Church has introduced prayers for ‘those endangered by the Touristic Wave’. So there are inducements to experiment with other options.
The owner of the hotel chain I studied said, ‘Make my hotel your laboratory.’ But hotels are not laboratories; they are there to provide strictly defined services, not to invent. Hotel schools are teaching approved methods and routines, which is a different education from that of the customers whose desires they are supposed to satisfy. The more customers are educated, the more they say that one of their major aims is to learn new things, but hotels have yet to see themselves as institutions encouraging learning. And yet many of them are situated in places where they could be significant players in international relations and in the dialogue of civilisations. Diplomats can sign treaties promising friendship between nations, but private individuals decide for themselves whom they call a friend. There is no reason why hotels should always remain just passive providers of rooms in which outside organisations can hold conferences, when they could organise meetings and conversations themselves. Instead of just providing beds for tourists who spend the day out of doors visiting ancient monuments, they can organise encounters between guests and local people that can transform present-day realities by creating personal sympathies that make a memorable difference to both parties. Instead of just pampering their guests with physical indulgences, they can interest themselves in their minds and hearts and win recognition as sources of cultural inspiration. Instead of guests leaving with nothing to take back except photographs and souvenirs, they can return as ambassadors for the country they have visited, ambassadors of a new kind, who speak not as representatives of millions, but as individuals made of many contradictions, who acknowledge the contradictions not only within nations but even more within the individuals they have met. It is not that such initiatives would be too expensive that makes hotels hesitate – because a business plan has shown how they could be profitable, particularly in slack periods – but rather that hoteliers do not have the training to implement them. Graduates in the humanities from top universities rarely decide to become hoteliers, but it is possible that more of them might; a few decades ago, no-one would have predicted that so many would become celebrity chefs.
The hotel chain I studied prides itself on offering old world comfort and civility, on the model of the ‘country house’. But the country house offered much more than comfort. It was where the governing classes could meet and get to know each other; they went there for conversations with interesting people, to cultivate sociability and to promote both urban and rural virtues. The more the host and hostess could dazzle their guests with art and culture, the greater their reputation. Hotels can organise structured conversations at which their guests can get to know different kinds of people from the surrounding city, and they can create portraits of individuals from many occupations and backgrounds, revealing the diversity of interests which normally remain hidden from visitors. For hotels to become not elite salons but centres of discussion with a wider range of participants would have been difficult in the past, but it is now possible to recognise that employees of hotels include many individuals of talent who are keen to play a more significant social role as hosts and hostesses, and who are interesting persons from whose extraordinary experiences in many parts of the world the guests have much to learn; and to whom they have much to give. The superficiality of communication between the two is a relic of outdated prejudices. Learning no longer means just acquiring information
, but learning with and from others, with a desire to pass on one’s learning, a desire to give, and a concern for those one has helped to learn. Learning has become reciprocal, displacing the ideal of ‘customer service’ that still dominates the business agenda. Hotels try hard to win the loyalty of their guests, by distributing trivial gifts and little privileges, but guests would be more loyal if they could give the hotel something that only they could give, their knowledge and their experience.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 30
