My Life as a Hotel Spy

Last week, I wrote some articles about "The Great Watermelon Saga of 2008" and I briefly mentioned that I became a Marriott spy. I wanted to extol the virtues of spying a bit more here today. All of the big hotel chains use spies, and spies aren't cheap. Hotels usually pay high fees to companies that send undercover guests to hotels, and those guests rate the hotels against an established of service points.

As a platinum guest who's stayed in literally hundreds of Marriott hotels, I told the director of the latest Marriott I was staying in that I was uniquely qualified to observe the staff, rate points of service, and to record my stay through daily emailed reports to him. He was thrilled and he offered me some pretty serious points to perform the service.

Why not do this yourself? If you've stayed in enough hotels to learn what to expect, you could certainly offer to help them improve their service. So… If you promise the director an emailed report every day, what sorts of things would you report on? Here's a list of what I wrote about:

• I took extra care to look at the nametags and to learn the names of the support staff who were extra courteous or extra helpful. I made sure the Director knew who they were.
• I also took down the names of the staff who were clearly insane, like Jaime the Crazed Watermelon Man. The director should know about their antics as well.
• I ate most of my meals at the hotel and wrote up each one of them, good or bad. Curiously, I found that some of the cheaper meals from the more casual restaurant were far better in quality than some of the more expensive meals in the more upscale of the two restaurants. I tried to be very specific in this regard for example, the cheese sauce on the Lobster Mac & Cheese dish was obviously home-made, very creamy, and had just the perfect "twang" of gruyere. It was outstanding and I told them so. On the other hand, chicken is done at 170 degrees and doesn't have to be cooked until it's dry enough to bounce, like their bacon wrapped chicken breast with bleu cheese.
• I tried to stay very observant of the little things. Torn wallpaper in the public restroom in the lobby, loose paper that I noticed in the hallways, even a loud "clicking" noise that turned out to be a faulty relay in the swimming pool's chlorination system… all of it got written down and reported.
• Finally, I made extra sure that for every bad thing I wrote down, I found something good to say. I didn't want to sound like a super negative critic.

When it was all over, I got some really nice feedback and a "Thank You" note from the director of the hotel (not to mention the extra points, cha-ching)! Don't think for a minute that I won't be doing this more often!

EXTRA: If you have questions for Ken regarding business travel, hotels, airplanes, etc, please call 1-877-49-EXPERT. Your questions will be recorded and Ken will answer the best ones in his Ask the Expert podcast show