ONE ‘Better Than Your Mother’
THE LUXURY PRODUCT
Then I pick up the telephone
and call Room Service.
Ooooooooo I absolutely love Room Service.
They always know it's me
and they say “Yes, Eloise?”
Kay Thompson, Eloise (1955)
One of my first interviewees was Martha, a white woman in her early fifties who frequently stayed in luxury hotels with her husband, the chair and CEO of a large recycling company. Asked to describe “incredible service,” she mentioned a particular hotel, calling it “great” for the following reasons:
Well, their linens, and the services, and they bring things, they're just so accommodating. They go out of their way to make you feel, y'know, like you matter. “If you weren't here, we would be very unhappy about it.”…They zero in on you, and they make you feel like you're not lost in this huge crowd. And I think that's really the nicest thing, because all of us, when we're traveling, we're not home. And to be taken care of and to have somebody who's gonna do things for you in a way that's, like, better than your mother!…It makes you feel good.
Martha starts by mentioning material items—the linens—but she quickly shifts to identifying the workers’ treatment of guests as the main element of luxury service. She describes personalized, genuine attention, the exertion of extra effort, and the legitimation of needs. She is talking about a sense of being cared for and made to feel special in a way beyond what she might expect even from her mother.
Though they usually use different language, managers’ comments echo Martha's intuitive emphasis on “positive human interactions” as the crucial feature of luxury.1 For instance, Isadore Sharp, chair and CEO of the Four Seasons chain, stated that luxury “isn't just building a different kind of building and adding more amenities; it comes through the service element.”2 Although managers I interviewed mentioned the physical aspects of the hotels—sophisticated, distinctive design; unusual, high-quality amenities; and comfortable rooms—managers saw distinctive service as the key to separating luxury from nonluxury hotels and to distinguishing luxury properties from one another.
This chapter explores the defining elements of luxury service as they emerged implicitly and explicitly in interviews with guests and managers, in industry literature, and in ethnographic observation. These aspects include personalization; anticipation, legitimation, and resolution of guests’ needs; unlimited available physical labor; and a deferential, sincere demeanor on the part of workers. Interactive luxury service entails more than broadly conceived “emotional labor,” which Hochschild defines as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” that is sold for a wage.3 It is, in fact, akin to intersubjective “recognition,” which Jessica Benjamin terms “that response from the other which makes meaningful the feelings, actions, and intentions of the self.” Luxury service entails recognizing a person's “acts, her feelings, her intentions, her existence, her independence.”4
Guests prefer to interpret luxury service as care, akin to that provided by the idealized mother Martha invokes. But this service is also similar to the labor of another kind of reproductive worker: the domestic servant, who provides both physical labor and deference while lacking authority. I explore the twin issues of care and subordination in the context of structural inequality. I also describe the organization of luxury service, showing how its production is divided up among workers with radically different jobs and personal characteristics, and I analyze what this division of labor means for worker consent and the normalization of inequality. I begin with a short history of the luxury hotel.
THE RISE OF LUXURY HOTELS
The word hotel came into use in the United States in the late eighteenth century to designate taverns and inns that served upper-class clients, a new distinction in hospitality practices.5 The upscale Tremont Hotel, which opened in Boston in 1829, has long been considered the first “modern” hotel in the United States.6 The Tremont and other hotels that followed it during the nineteenth century demonstrated impressive technical achievements in architecture, services, and amenities. In the early years, these included gas lighting, private rooms, and indoor plumbing; later, hotels introduced electricity and elevators to marveling guests. Luxury hotels were defined by their large size, tasteful aesthetics, cleanliness, high-quality food, and prime location, as well as the privacy and security they afforded and service marked by “faultless personal attention.”7 The “highest achievement of the first class hotel” was that “each guest may easily fancy himself a prince surrounded by a flock of courtiers.”8 These “public” institutions were seen to represent modernity, technological innovation, and progress.9 Important social and political figures frequented or even lived in these hotels.10
By the 1930s, personalized service, replacing the earlier obsequious, racialized servitude, had surpassed technological innovation as the key selling point for and main managerial concern in grand hotels such as the Waldorf-Astoria.11 But after midcentury, palace hotels declined in importance. In the 1950s, development of the “motor hotel,” spurred by the growth of the national highway system and suburbanization, as well as the increasing importance of chain hotels and franchising, shifted the focus of the industry to midrange hotels in cities and on the road.12 In the 1960s, convention hotels boomed; in the 1970s, limited-service and budget hotels emerged. Although luxury hotels did not disappear during this period, they were not especially prominent in the industry.
In the 1980s and 1990s, however, upscale hotels returned to visibility and growth. Rising international travel, for both business and pleasure, spurred demand. Intense competitive pressures in this period led to diversification of the whole industry through segmentation and branding, which further codified the luxury segment.13 Favorable tax laws led to the building or acquisition of upscale “trophy hotels,” even when they might not have been profitable. In the 1980s, a period of increasing income inequality, demand for “high-priced” lodging, including luxury, outpaced that for lower-priced hotel rooms.14
New ideas of luxury came to the fore, including innovations in design and available services. One general manager I interviewed attributed the “invention” of the “perfect luxury bathroom” to a particular hotelier in the 1980s, for example. Concierge services, twenty-four-hour room, laundry, and business services, flexible arrival and departure arrangements, fitness centers and spas, and a range of upgraded room amenities became widespread.15 International luxury chains expanded in this period. The Ritz-Carlton company, for example, had closed all but one of its six properties by 1940. This Boston hotel and the rights to the Ritz-Carlton name were sold in 1982, and the company (owned by Marriott since 1998) now operates over sixty hotels globally. The Four Seasons chain likewise began with one nonluxury property in Toronto in 1960 and has expanded, especially since the 1980s, to over sixty-five hotels and resorts worldwide.
The national recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the savings and loan debacle brought crisis to the highly cyclical hotel industry. Like other segments, however, luxury rebounded by middecade when the industry reorganized itself to increase profitability and efficiency.16 Developers began again to build luxury hotels.17 Thanks to Internet startup millionaires and stock market high rollers, these hotels reaped record profits during the boom of the late 1990s, gaining more value than other industry segments.18 In 1998, 5 percent of newly opened hotels were classified as upscale. Demand led to rate inflation; in 1999, hotel rooms with rates of five hundred dollars or more per night had increased threefold since 1994, and upscale hotel rates had risen by 31 percent since 1996.19