The curse of Sundays struck again yesterday - no guests. Her ladyship was in no state to serve breakfast anyway having lost her voice due to an annoyingly persistent cold. She headed for the doctor’s while I caught up on sleep.
It’s looking like a quiet week at present, although two bookings came in this morning. You can guess where from!
Back to the gradings debacle. I’m having a look at the guidelines which are, frankly, anything but clear. Let’s take a look at a few of the categories to see what’s required…
Now then, I’ve made this a bit bigger than usual so you can read it. It’s worth noting that this is from a July 2005 version and the guidelines have probably been changed a couple of hundred times since then.
Breakfast: well, we ask guests to choose what they want when they come down for breakfast, we offer hot drinks and toast and we clear the tables promptly. So looking at these guidelines we’d score 4 star. But the assessor didn’t stay the night, so he didn’t have breakfast, so we weren’t graded on it.
Departure: My hand-knitted computerised reservations and point of sale system will produce an itemised bill for the guests, we’re happy to accept almost any form of payment (except Amex) and, Oh dear! “Exchange of pleasantries upon departure!” How quaint! So that would be a 4 again except that the assessor didn’t check out cos he didn’t check in so we weren’t graded on that either.
In any case, the guidelines are laid out so that if we scored 5 stars in 79 out of 80 categories and 1 star in the eightieth one, then we’d still be one star. We could have mirrors on the ceilings and pink champagne on ice, but if the front of the building needs painted it would count for nothing. It does all appear a bit nonsensical.
Guests occasionally ask, during the exchange of pleasantries on departure, how many stars the hotel has, but as far as we know few make a booking solely on that basis.
Five weeks until our holiday. We’re going to the same self catering cottage we stayed at last year. It’s wonderfully relaxing with a swimming pool and hot tub in the garden. How many stars does it have? Don’t know, don’t care. Neither do the owners since the whole year’s booked out by March.
During the past three years we’ve aimed to please the people who’ve stayed with us. Judging by the comments in our visitors book it’s been quite successful. Attempting to conform to a set of ever changing guidelines instead is probably a recipe for insanity.
We have three guests so far tonight. I must remember to exchange pleasantries with them at breakfast tomorrow.
