What a hotel is actually selling

A hotel sells a bed, a location and a service culture. Star ratings measure the first comprehensively, ignore the second entirely and cannot measure the third at all, which is why a five star hotel can be a worse stay than a small one with no rating, and why the photographs are almost no help.

What the stars actually certify

National systems differ but the shape is consistent: a set of facility requirements. Room service hours, minimum room size, whether there is a concierge, whether the bathroom has a bath as well as a shower, how many restaurants are on site. Every one of those is a capital expenditure that a developer can buy.

None of them measures whether the person at reception looks up. Which is the entire difference between a stay that works and one that does not.

The ten minute test

Service cultures reveal themselves fast if you know what to watch. The tells are consistent across price levels and across countries.

• The first request is always handled well, everywhere. Ignore it.
• The second is usually handled. The third, particularly one that is slightly inconvenient, is the diagnostic. A good house solves it without visible effort or rediscovers you afterwards to confirm. An ordinary one takes the request and it disappears.
• Whether anybody uses your name a second time, unprompted, without checking a screen.
• Whether staff who are not dealing with you acknowledge you in a corridor. That is a culture question, not a training one, and it comes from management.
• How long the phone rings, and whether the person answering knows what is happening in the building.

Anybody can handle the first request. The third one tells you what the management is like.

Staff turnover, the best proxy available

Hotels with long serving staff are almost always better to stay in, because institutional knowledge is the raw material of service. It is also one of the few things you can ask about directly. A concierge or a head waiter who has been there eleven years will tell you so, and a house where every face is new has a reason for that which is usually visible in the management.

The same signal appears in reviews if you read them for the right thing. Reviews that name individual staff members repeatedly, by name, across several years, describe a stable house. Reviews that praise the building and never a person describe a different kind of place.

Sound, which nothing measures

The most common ruined stay is a noise problem, and no rating system addresses it. The variables are the street, the lift shaft, the ice machine, the bar terrace below, the bin collection at five, and the thickness of the wall to the next room.

Two habits solve most of it. Ask for a room above the third floor and away from the lift when booking, which costs nothing and is usually granted. And check the room before unpacking, because moving is easy in the first ten minutes and awkward after the case is open.

Location, priced properly

A hotel twenty minutes further out at two thirds the price has to be discounted by the taxis. Four return journeys a day at fifteen each across five days is three hundred, which usually exceeds the saving and always exceeds the patience. Central is not a luxury, it is frequently the cheaper option once the arithmetic includes the moving around.

The exception is a destination where the point is the property rather than the place, in which case location is irrelevant and the only question is whether you are prepared to eat every dinner on site, which after three nights most people are not.

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