Skift offers an opinion piece framed as the customer isn’t always right suggesting hotels need to crack down on bad behavior. But the message isn’t really about hotels versus the customer, it’s which customer is right?
In other words, as guests let it all hang out, it’s the rest of the hotel’s customers who suffer. Those customers aren’t getting their money’s worth from a luxury establishment, because the guests traipsing through the lobby in swimsuits or heading to breakfast in their bathrobes make the hotel experience not luxury.
The hotel invests in an entire aesthetic – from its architecture to the decor of its rooms – and has that creation dashed by the aesthetic of other guests.
- Formal attire isn’t required
- And most hotels wouldn’t have customers at all if they only welcomed the beautiful people
- But self-indulgent guests imposing externalities on everyone else staying at a property degrade the whole experience and scare away repeat business, “it’s the kind of place where…”
This Hyatt Regency Amsterdam guest was standing out in the January cold in his bathroom, smoking not-a-cigarette.
This gentleman at the Westin Siray Bay in Phuket came down to breakfast in his bathrobe, and sat with too-wide-a-stance.
And was this really necessary at the Royal Palms in Scottsdale?
Héctor Elizondo’s hotel manager may have been ultimately charmed by Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman but his first reaction was the correct one: “Things that go on in other hotels don’t happen at the Regent Beverly Wilshire.”
You may be seated in a high-end hotel lounge, ensconced in a refined atmosphere, and it’s interrupted by another guest’s loud FaceTime call. Or picture a five-star dining room where athleisure has become as common as formal attire. Public spaces have been transformed into personal living rooms, including guests in their underwear or worse.
There are hotels where this is fine! But each brand needs to know who its customers are, and what it’s trying to achieve, and then take a firmer stance upholding the standards it settles on. That’s how to enhance the experience for everyone, and improve business.
Skift notes that Hôtel du Cap prominently displays house rules in each room and enforces dress codes to preserve its elegant atmosphere. By setting clear standards and enforcing them with finesse, the hotel ensures that individual behavior doesn’t overshadow the collective experience. That’s not something most hotels can or should do, but there are minimums that ought to apply many other places.
A casual, beachfront resort might allow more relaxed attire, while a luxury city hotel may politely enforce a more formal dress code. The key is clear communication, setting expectations both before and during the guest’s stay, and ensuring that any enforcement is handled with tact and respect.
Guests and hotels working together to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and consideration can significantly elevate the overall experience. A silent majority of hotel guests likely appreciate higher standards of behavior for other guests, whether they realize it or not, because it affects the background experience the property can deliver.
A very talkative group of American male buddies were at table near me the other day and agreeing with each other that the women at the high end resorts in Europe just aren’t as attractive as they used to be. The complaint seemed to also touch upon there being less topless suntanning going on than there used to be at these resorts and that the topless guests weren’t the ones they wanted to see topless.
People are little piggies, they’re ignorant, and lack self-esteem. “Look at me” they say. Yeah, we’re looking at you for sure. And we wish you’d decamp to the nearest motel with a number in its name where you belong. These are the bums that appear in public looking like … bums. Hotels should enforce rules like getting dressed for breakfast, what’s so difficult with saying “Sorry, sir, you’ll need to get dressed”. The bums are too dumb to figure it out for themselves.
I see nothing wrong with wearing the hotel’s robe around the property. I recall the high end Hyatt in Kyoto, forget which one, even encouraging it. Very relaxing and comfortable.
Why is the Scottdales patron face blocked out and the Phuket one not? May as well shame all or none…
@GUdimwit
What a contrived and insignificant attempt to hate on Americans, as all you leftists love to do. Yes, how dare those men be heterosexual. Do you pee sitting down? How about get on board your party’s climate change agenda and stop traveling? Oh wait, carbon emissions is just a problem when it’s the unwashed masses.
And then there is racism Kevin.
I have had a Conrad tell me I can’t come into the lounge in trousers , shirt and leather sandals and a minute later welcome a white person in shorts and bright yellow sports shoes
Mantis is off his prejudicial rocker as usual when he’s not busy whipping himself or others into a frenzy about Americans’ pets disappearing into the stomachs of Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
Some of those American guys are friends of mine, and there is nothing contrived about the actual conversation and my being involved in it. :rolleyes:
And also on the topic about hotels having “guest standards” on display that have changed over time, can’t say I have noticed any massive increase in people coming to hotel restaurants dressed any more “inappropriately” than 30-40 years ago. Except now you get a lot more female guests of various ages coming into hotel restaurants and being in hotel lobbies with derrière-hugging attire that gets jaws dropping with tongue-wagging or eyes rolling from the easily aroused and morality police (if even different).
Suhas is completely right in indicating that there is too often a racist dimension to policing the attire or even behavior of customers.
A “white” British tourist in a string bikini walking into a higher end Omani hotel off the beach won’t be confronted by the hotel over attire while a South Asian woman in a short skirt and low cut blouse coming in the front door gets stopped for being “inappropriate”.
You knew it would only take a NY minute before the race card came out.