Hôtelier
What they don’t check in at the concierge desk of your nearest upmarket hotel, although they likely should — and we have made the recommendation to operators around the country in our most recent newsletter—are your secrets.
They’re portable and hard to discern and harder still to tease out from behind the polished marble of reception but they speak in small ways to those whose job it is to watch for them, to send champagne up with the bellhops at the right time, to know when an unexpected expense is just the cost of a good host.
Here at the Apollo, we train our team to keep a close eye on the things that usually go unnoticed. Hands trying hard to keep still. Perfumes the wrong way around. Names that don’t fit faces. That’s a common one — most people do, despite their best efforts, look just like you’d expect.
Guests often give themselves away too early. Elevator doors porous to privacy. Not that they’re concerned with the opinions of the mere staff. This is, however, an industry that trades as much on stories as it does on the flow of credit so the climbing towards the more luxurious hotels, like ours, is often more for whispers than for coin.
Affairs, to be quite honest, are so droll. So common, so clear, so obvious. The well-dressed men with the same booking and the same credit card and a growing accumulation of loyalty points for which late nineties marketing schemes are to blamed and judged. A rotunda of women except the same that appears with the children during the holidays. Sometimes her out and others in and so we send flowers the morning after the gentlemen have learned not, as we’ve mentioned, to discuss the bill upon checkout.
“Just parking,” they say.
The women have their dalliances too though they’re less brazen, less heinous — well, generally. More taste, more subtlety, the men rotating less quickly though we see them less often. At least, they check in less often.
And we’ve not even spoken yet of the cleaning staff who see only the aftermath. Alas for reasons antidote to keeping mum, the cleaners and the concierges speak as friends — because they are— and share room numbers and stories of the befores and the afters and they fill in the details as salaciously as possible and these stories are then passed on to our marketing department who do their best to attract those kinds of guests who come, go, and do a small amount of cosmetic damage in between. These are the ones we enjoy. A story to the rooms.
Of course, our spreadsheet folk would prefer no damage at all but what it is a good hôtel stay without a little regret? We promise you’ll not be the only ones to know.
But what, you ask, would it take for us to take no notice of you and your baggage, checked and unchecked, both wheeled in and chipped upon your shoulder? We must apologise, madam or monsieur, for there is no price at which the tale of your small quirks is not worth much more for us later in less tangible fashions.
Though if you’d like to share with us a better, stronger, more curious piece of information upon which neither of us should have stumbled, we have been known on occasion to look the other way—provided what you have to share is more useful than what you have to hide?
Oh, you wish to contest the usefulness of secrets? Knowledge to keep and protect rather than give away for trinkets?
Please, pray tell.
After all, our rooms are made for transience. And in the spaces we entertain ourselves with our stories. I suppose we owe you that. So next time you find yourself at the Apollo with some time to kill and some stories to tell, ask for me. Our bar is not the best in town but it competes. Vermouth on the house for a tall tale I can spread.
