So Much for Airbnb

Reading Thomas Friedman's column about airbnb and our new "sharing economy", I was looking forward to a discounted stay in a Bethesda mansion with access to a giant swimming pool, perhaps even a guided tour of the grounds in a Lexus SUV (hybrid, in case you were wondering) driven by my host. Given the owner's self-described sacrifice, buying up 7.5 acres and building a giant mansion in order to save the rest of us from having that land redeveloped into a subdivision that could house many families, you might think he was also interested in sparing the area from a Holiday Inn.

More than 50 percent of Airbnb hosts depend on it to pay their rent or mortgage today, Chesky added: “Ordinary people can now be micro-entrepreneurs.” Jamie Wong, co-founder of Vayable.com, a platform through which locals anywhere can become custom tour guides of their area, told me: “I moved out of my apartment in central San Francisco, rented a cheaper annex in a friend’s home, and ‘airbnb-ed’ my apartment for $200 a night and earned about $20,000 in a year. It enabled me to bootstrap my start-up. Airbnb was our first round of funding!” And just think how much better all this is for the environment — for people to be renting their spare bedrooms rather than building another Holiday Inn and another and another. ... The sharing economy — watch this space. This is powerful.

Alas, as powerful as the "sharing economy" may be, it seems to be one in which people at the margins do the sharing - people who can't pay their mortgage, or have to save up for a full year to be able to afford even one Rolex marginally bootstrap their business ideas.

Looking For Five Star Treatment In All The Wrong Places

I'll admit it. I haven't done much five star travel. With a few fleeting exceptions, my travel tops out at four stars, maybe 4.5. When I was recently planning a second honeymoon, I saw some wonderful deals on five star resorts. For one, sure, I may have had a celebrity neighbor and enjoyed an expansive private beach... or, should I say, being bored to tears on an expansive private beach... but that's not for me. For the other, the photographs of the resort made it clear that they were targeting a clientele that has a weekly wardrobe budget approximating what I spend in a year, maybe two. So no, even at "bargain prices" I knew those destinations weren't right for me.

In reading about the economic downturn I read how luxury travelers, those who routinely go to five star hotels and resorts, fall into two categories - the phenomenally wealthy whose assets and income are such that nothing ever puts a dent in their travel budgets or plans,¹ and those who are feeling the pinch of the decline in the economy. That latter set, it's said, would rather carve a few days off of a vacation than go downscale - or, as the article put it, once they've spent time in the Turks and Caicos, they would rather have a four day vacation there than take a week in the Dominican Republic. You know, facing the horror of 4.5 star treatment. (And I found myself thinking, "You're still talking about the type of vacation that would bore me to tears.")

So at this point, let me skip to the middle of this complaint about how the staff of luxury hotels hate their customers:

And I remembered that the happiest I have been on holidays in recent years is when I stayed in a five-quid-a-night hostel in Jerusalem with a big hole in the wall covered by a rug. Because I actually went out and I saw Jerusalem. When you stay in a luxury hotel, the luxury is the destination. You are essentially visiting a bathroom. You don't see anything except the luxury. And the luxury is the same wherever you go.

If you choose to think of the hotel as the destination, how can you expect to have a great vacation? If you spend thousands of dollars to travel to an exotic location and shutter yourself inside the local Ritz-Carlton, you may have a wonderful hotel experience (or not - we'll get to that part later), but the whole point of staying in that type of hotel is to be separated from the local culture. Once you get past the luxury, it's no different than staying in a good business traveler's chain hotel - the point is the consistency and predictability of your treatment and experience. If you're the type who won't leave your hotel room unless it's a literal flea trap, then stay in a flea trap or enjoy your luxury cocoon, but don't complain to me that you made the wrong choice.

The staff of these hotels are usually educated people from poor countries who spend all day waiting on people who are much stupider - and nastier - than them. As a result, they - entirely naturally - become bitter and are turned into status police. Their job is to assess if you belong there or not.

That will depend upon the location you pick and your choice of hotel. It's usually not too difficult to figure out from a hotel's literature or website whether it's the type of place where you're going to be expected to dress expensively, and it's easy enough to find another hotel where the other guests don't have quite the same sartorial expectations. Or if it's a smaller hotel staffed by people with long connections to the hotel and city, versus a huge commercial enterprise staffed by whomever will work for a salary as close as possible to minimum wage. But make no mistake, even if you feel that it's the staff that notices that you're underdressed, that expectation comes from your fellow five star travelers. When it comes to taking your money, most businesses aren't inclined to impose much of a dress code beyond "No shirt, no shoes, no service" - if that - but if doing otherwise makes other wealthy travelers unhappy they're going to start requiring jackets, ties, and the like. It's business.

I have also seen profound differences in the way my wife and I interact with hotel staff and the interactions of certain other people. We were recently at a small resort, being served our dinner, when another couple interrupted our server to demand his immediate attention - they wanted him to put more wood in the fireplaces near where they were sitting. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they were concerned that they weren't supposed to add wood themselves - something that would have taken all of the time and effort of walking six steps, picking up boards sitting next to the fireplace, and putting them into the fire - but they left no doubt that, in their mind, they were the most important people at the resort, justifying their insistent interruption of our table service.

My guess is that if they were to open their eyes, they would see something similar to what the author of the complaint describes as a consistent attitude of five star hotel staff: "This hate has followed me around the luxury hotels of Europe". Honestly, you can see a change in the eyes of a staff member who is asked to smile and serve an obnoxious guest. But at the same time, it helps you differentiate what happens when you treat the staff with respect and consideration.²

Consider this anecdote about President Obama's recent visit to the U.K.:

As the president stepped up to 10 Downing Street, he leant over, made eye contact, said something courteous, and shook the hand of the police officer standing guard. There’s always a police officer there; he is a tourist logo in his ridiculous helmet. He tells you that this is London, and the late 19th century. No one has ever shaken the hand of the policeman before, and like everyone else who has his palm touched by Barack Obama, he was visibly transported and briefly forgot himself. He offered the hand to Gordon Brown, the prime minister, who was scuttling behind.

It was ignored. He was left empty-handed. It isn’t that Mr. Brown snubbed the police officer; he just didn’t see him. To a British politician, a police officer is as invisible as the railings.

Whatever the price range, you'll probably find a lot less "hate" in the eyes of a hotel staff member if you notice them and treat them like they're human beings. When the "hate" follows you wherever you go, you need to stop and ask yourself a question: If the hotels are different, the cities are different, and the staff members are different, can you perhaps identify one element that remains the same through each encounter? Dare I ask, could that be where the problem lies?
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1. What a difference a year can make. The same author on a ludicrously expensive, star-studded resort:

I am in Paradise. I am lying by the sparkling Caribbean Sea in Barbados, in the shadow of a palm tree, drinking fruit punch and reading the Daily Mail.... Of the stars and Masters of the Universe who come here, all will pay at least £40,000 and others, with parents and children in tow, will pay up to £400,000, because a 14-night stay is mandatory over Christmas.

Tell us about the staff?

Entering is thrilling - you pass through bright white gates and a grassy fairyland, studded with gushing fountains and floodlit palm trees and lackeys well practised in appearing overjoyed to see you....

A flunkey brings me a menu to goggle at. A hamburger is $30. A pizza is £25. An olive is £2. But it's cheap at the price, to eat near Michael Winner, film director and restaurant critic, and Philip Green, who sold me the dress I'm wearing, although he doesn't know it.

Although I'm sure she would argue that her choice of words is technically correct, their connotation is something else. How long would it take a normal person to recognize that the people she describes as "lackeys" and "flunkeys" pick up on her attitude?

2. For an interesting glimpse into the human psyche - how quickly somebody can be drawn into a world where she doesn't recognize the existence of an "us" and "them" so as to even be aware of what others are doing to float her luxurious lifestyle, see the PBS series Manor House.

Where Have All The Agents Gone?

It's a good question. Seth Godin's correct that differentiation is key - if you wish to survive as a travel agent, stock broker, real estate agent... you need to find some way to either justify your commission or fee.

I recently took a trip to Chile, made much better by the advice of Ellen Craig, who unabashedly bills herself as a "luxury travel consultant". She helped us find and stay in properties we were unlikely to either identify or choose on our own, and those properties proved to be excellent to amazing.

Here, differentiation is the price point. But if you're planning a fifth anniversary trip (as we were), maybe it's time for some self-indulgence.

Planes, Automobiles... But No Trains

(Unless you count the airport shuttles.)

For those who have somehow managed to miss the wacky weather, yesterday morning was not a good time to be connecting through Atlanta.

If I may state the obvious:

• If you're working in an airport and somebody is connecting on a return international flight, it's not particularly helpful to ask them why they didn't make their travel plans around U.S. weather forecasts from the preceding few days.

• If you're running an airline and have hundreds of passengers - literally hundreds - lined up for help, even if no flights are going out, it's beyond obnoxious not to have more than one person working the reservations counter. (And no, it doesn't make up for much when you finally bring somebody in to help out an hour or so later.)

• If you're in a part of the country that rarely gets snow, yes, it's cool to stop your truck and take pictures of your small child making and throwing snowballs. But in a safe location - not on the side of the most treacherous, slippery, snow-covered exit ramp in your state.

• If you are providing roadside assistance for car rentals, and your customer calls about replacing a car due to a potentially dangerous problem, you're correct to answer "yes" when the customer asks if they'll be expecting you at the nearest rental location so you can exchange the car - but you have to follow that up by ensuring that the people at that location actually will be expecting the customer.

• If you're driving from Atlanta to Michigan, even if it's entirely necessary due to the weather, it's painful to have to drive around Tennessee.

• Real life road trips are nowhere near as interesting as those in movies - they don't even come with a laugh track.

But even considering the 40+ hours of travel time on the return trip, it was still a great vacation.

When was the last time you took a winter trip (at least in this hemisphere) and sighed, "Thank goodness we're back in the north, out of the snowstorms and flurries, where the roads are clear and dry."

"How We Became the United States of France"

Worth reading. It probably would have been funnier yesterday, and it will probably seem less satirical tomorrow.

Personally, I'm in the "France is a nice place to visit, but..." category. That said, it's a really nice place to visit. If you're staying in Paris, check out the Hotel Saint James near Place Victor Hugo - tourists (who want to be a bit off the beaten tourist path) should check for good specials, and everybody else should max out the corporate credit card.

Rolling Baggage

A peculiar editorial in the New York Times takes on rolling baggage. The author's primary concern appears to be that rolling baggage is annoying to air travelers - that is, the ones who don't have similar bags. People get bumped, have bags rolled over their toes, have to deal with delays while passengers try to stow their bags in overhead bins.... Fair enough. But those problems arise less from the bags themselves, and more from the inconvenience and delay of checking your luggage and retrieving it at the end of a trip. Not to mention the rough treatment often given to checked bags, with new scars appearing on your bags at the conclusion of pretty much every trip. It would be easy enough for airlines to impose more restrictive rules on the size of carry-on luggage, but instead they're doing the opposite - imposing additional restrictions (and surcharges) on checked luggage.

It's also a fair argument that rolling luggage often results in people packing more than they need - it's easier to carry extra weight, because you don't have to carry the bag through the airport, and it appears to be human nature to want to fill a suitcase even when you know that you're packing more than you need.

Also: aesthetics. Your dorky rolling bag doesn’t say, “I’m embarking on a voyage.” It says, “I’m going to a conference in Cleveland.” And maybe you are, but you don’t have advertise it. The swashbuckling adventurer hoists a leather rucksack, or a battered canvas duffel. He doesn’t tug his bag behind him on a leash like a stubborn and especially boring pet.

It’s easy to see the appeal of wheeled luggage, of course. It eases our burdens and lifts the weight off our shoulders. It keeps our neatly pressed jackets un-mussed. But rolling bags are really functional only for the type of journey that goes taxi-airport-taxi-hotel-shuttle bus-convention center. Outside this comfortable circuit, they’re often useless.

Well, a lot of the people with those rolling bags are the equivalent of somebody going to a conference in Cleveland. And with all due respect to the swashbuckling adventurer, I've been smacked more than a few times by oversized duffels, and have been held up while people tried to squeeze them into overhead bins.

I found this argument somewhat amusing:

I’ve been traveling a lot recently, in countries ranging from developed to less developed to dear Lord, is that a monkey attacking a naked child? In harsher conditions, a dainty rolling bag is absurdly out of place. It’s no fun rolling those wheels across a “street” that’s just a rain-soaked blotch of mud. Or bouncing them up the stairs of a packed train station. Or dragging them through a marketplace where puddles are indeed full of fish and goat entrails. (Enjoy that pungent odor when your bag is back in your room.)

The comical inference is that the author initially tried to "rough it" on a lengthy journey through the developing world with a rolling suitcase designed as airplane carry-on baggage, but found it to be wanting. If so, I'm not surprised by his conclusion - no sensible person would try that. But I'll tell you this - while I avoided marketplaces littered with goat entrails, I did quite a bit of travel with a "rolling duffel" from L.L.Bean, and found both that I could use the handles and strap to carry the bag when I didn't choose to roll it, and that it was at times terrifically convenient to be able to roll the bag instead of carrying it. Including at airports and railroad stations in the developing world.