Gulliver | Service in Britain

Smegma Air

Online review sites have forced hotels to be nicer to their guests

By B.R.

IN HIS travel book “Notes from a Small Island”, Bill Bryson, an American writer, describes his first brush with English hospitality. Arriving in Dover from Calais in 1973, he envisioned a hearty welcome at a small hotel on the beachfront. Instead he found somewhere that treated him as a horrible inconvenience. There were rules for everything, including when he was allowed to run a bath or turn on the heating in his room. He was lectured about the importance of wiping his feet when arriving and was told he would have to give notice if he was expecting a phone call. No sooner had he checked in than the proprietor, one Mrs Smegma, told him he had to leave for the day: guests, she explained, were not permitted in the hotel between breakfast and 4pm. The difference in cultures left him dumbfounded: “Where I came from, you got a room in a motel, spent ten hours making a lavish and possibly irredeemable mess of it, and left early the next morning,” he wrote. “This was like joining the army.”

The final ignominy came a few days into his stay:

On the third afternoon as I crept in Mrs Smegma confronted me in the hallway with an empty cigarette packet, and demanded to know if it was I who had thrust it in the privet hedge. I began to understand why innocent people sign extravagant confessions in police stations. That evening, I forgot to turn off the water heater after a quick and stealthy bath and compounded the error by leaving strands of hair in the plughole. The next morning came the final humiliation. Mrs Smegma marched me wordlessly to the toilet and showed me a little turd that had not flushed away. We agreed that I should leave after breakfast. I caught a fast train to London, and had not been back to Dover since.

The point of relating this story is not that it is extraordinary. On the contrary, it was pretty much English hospitality as usual back then. Foreigners often make the mistake of watching television programmes such as “Fawlty Towers” and assuming they were comedies. Brits know them to be documentaries.

It isn’t like that now. Today, service is taken seriously and, even if it can sometimes be a little amateurish, nearly everyone buys into the idea that the guests are there to be served. Perhaps the biggest single reason why things have improved beyond recognition is the internet and, in particular, review sites such as TripAdvisor.

There is no way that a hotel run by Mrs Smegma could thrive nowadays. Too many people check online reviews before booking a stay somewhere. In fact, forget about a one-star TripAdvisor rating for a modern-day Mrs Smegma. In all likelihood, such a proprietress would already be the victim of a viral name-and-shame.

This blog recently covered the plans by TripAdvisor and Expedia to make a serious attempt at including customer reviews in their flight searches. Many of us will have flown on the equivalent of Mrs Smegma Airways. (Is it fanciful to imagine a young Michael O'Leary, many years before becoming boss of Ryanair, staying in her hotel and recognising a business model that he could transfer to the skies?) So could customer reviews have a similar effect on that sector?

There are important differences between booking a hotel and a flight. A hotel is a destination, an integral part of the holiday experience. So we are more likely to pay extra to get something we like. Planes, on the other hand, are just the inconvenient means of getting there, the bit we endure until the holiday starts. Hence we tend to choose an airline solely on price. Furthermore, hotels are what Zhan Pang of the University of Lancaster Management School describes as “horizontally differentiated”. Put simply, we all have different ideas about what makes a great hotel. Two completely contrasting but equally priced establishments might be ideal for different types of people. Reviews help enormously in making those differences clear. Flights are more vertically differentiated; they offer a similar service so it is much simpler to know which is best. No one wants a small seat rather than a large one, a far-away television rather than a personal entertainment system, or a tuna sandwich instead of boeuf bourguignon.

And yet, there must be hope that once airline ratings reach some kind of critical mass, it will be impossible to ignore them. If the choice is between a one-star rated flight for $200, and a five-star rated one for $220, surely many of us would go for the latter. When confronted with that stark decision, suddenly $20 doesn’t seem much to pay to avoid a miserable few hours. And so airlines, like hotels, will have no choice but to focus on both price and quality. In such an environment, the hope must be that Mrs Smegma's airline, like her hotel, would find survival impossible.

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