Deciding how satisfied you are with a service as intimate as staying in a hotel should necessarily require a lot of self-awareness and soul searching because let's be fair; it's like being a guest in someone's house but you don't meet the person only their staff and although the staff are there to look after you they don't have to like you and in fact to pretend they should is preposterous and in fact if they resented you that would be quite reasonable.
I always feel uncertain in a hotel because I fall between the cracks of being a middle aged white man and we always, notoriously, get everything on a plate, and of course at the same time I am an extraordinarily empathic cod-socialist who thinks everybody deserves the opportunity to fulfil their destiny particularly creatively even when frustratingly a lot of 'folks' seem resistant to doing so in a way that pleases me. I know, I sound more like a columnist for The Spectator every day. My grandmother would be proud.
The hotel I am staying at in Canberra has these things wrong with it. First is the bathroom, with its lidless toilet and hand rail, its shower which is basically half the room itself (which is, I think, almost the entirety of what was once a complete bedroom; at least, it looks like each room is two rooms joined together then split a bit into bedroom-bathroom) and a central plughole has a lot of the feels of an aged care home. For all I know that is an OHS/public liability requirement so I won't get too worked up about it. But the general rudeness/apathy of the staff (I don't blame them, but why am I part of this process) and the ugliness of the fixtures etc. This hotel has importance in the history of early Canberra and every time I walk to the lobby (they put me right at one corner of the building, as far as possible from the rest of the hotel, for reasons unclear) (to me anyway) I am confronted by four or five of my least favourite prime ministers. I amused myself a couple of times (I am embarrassed to admit this I suppose) with the idea of writing a letter to the management claiming to feel personally triggered/affronted/singled out by a route that takes me past so many 'loser' PMs (Frank Forde, Earle Page, you know, the ones who served a week and a half) but then I would have to concede that I also get a good view of Menzies, the one who served about as long as the rest put together, and I'd have to mount a case for why he was a different kind of loser (don't even start me on Stanley friggin' Bruce, who I also saw in the rogues' gallery near Menzies).
People used to say, in the days of the cinema, that cinemas made most of their money from the popcorn and oversize buckets of coke, well, sure, I don't necessarily believe that but I have to assume that hotels make a sizeable amount from the minibar and things like giving you absolutely lowest-grade, smell-of-an-oily-rag wifi and then charging you extra for something you can actually use.
I have a lot of other complaints, but they are gazumped by how irritating it is to write down the complaints, particularly in the knowledge that I am checking out in two and a half hours or less, so I'm not going to persist. It doesn't do you or me any favours. I think perhaps the truth of the matter is that, counter to expectations, airbnb has spoiled me. I've only had really one or two terrible airbnb experiences, and I suppose on a certain level airbnb goes overboard on trying to make people's experience of staying in someone else's home they actually don't even know, bearable and not gross, and you have heaps more choices about what you eat and do and you're not in some little cell surrounded by angst. Necessarily.
No comments:
Post a Comment