A luxury hotel chain has announced that it will be discontinuing room service at its major midtown Manhattan hotel this August. Food and beverage delivery is being replaced by a new “grab and go” self-service offering in rooms. The horror!
The cost of maintaining a staff of waiters and kitchen workers throughout the day when most room service orders are made for the breakfast hour is apparently prohibitive; but couldn’t they just scale things back a little? Maybe make it only available from 6-11am, then 5-midnight?
As a female road warrior of many years standing, I believe
room service is the last bastion of sanity in our round-the-clock, work every
day, be accessible all the time, mind-numbing and soul-crushing business
culture.
How many nights have I spent in luxury hotels where the
availability of a hamburger and glass (or 2) of wine at 10pm (late because of
my wildly delayed flight!) ensured that I would be healthy, happy, sane and
steady for the following day’s stressful round robin of meetings and
presentations ? Or how that early
morning breakfast tray featuring a breakfast fit for a field hand, coupled with
a massive pot of fully caffeinated coffee,
helped me recover from the deficient sleep of the night before, making
it possible for me to be coherent with my client an hour or so later?
Or how room service – followed by a leisurely bubble bath
and a great in-room movie that I never seemed to make it to the theatre to see –
made my business trip feel like a little “just-for-me” vacation masquerading as
work?
A note of caution to hotel chains everywhere: Abandon room service at your peril, for we
will abandon our loyalty to you as readily as we have shredded the loyalty cards of airlines that continuously disappoint us.
You need us more than you think. It’s true that all we need is a stinking
(not bug ridden) bed, but most of us we want our room service too – and we’ll
happily pay for it.
You’ve been warned. 
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