Categories
Butler training

From Old England to New England

It can be quite confusing, driving in Virginia, or for that matter, most of New England, for one drives through towns and counties one was driving through a few weeks earlier in Old England. It is not just the names that are the same, but the landscape seems so, too. We found our way, nevertheless to the cradle of the American Revolution that freed New England from the authority of Old England. There we stayed with some dear friends, Dr. David Justis and Nuala Galbari, an amazing couple who give themselves continually to friends, community, and the animal kingdom: they love life in many directions. We enjoyed a Sherlock Holmes evening with their friends, and met their unruly pet rabbit, who when he is not nibbling on priceless old medical texts, is snuggling up to David or evading capture. Then there was Corvus, their recently deceased pet crow with a disability for whom they had built a heated cage outside, and Rachel, the friendly raccoon, and so on—all immortalized in Nuala’s  book, The Woods of Wicomico. Too soon, it was time to leave for our next assignment, a good ten hours driving further North in Rhode Island.

Next stop was  the faithfully rebuilt and just-opened Ocean House atop Watch Hill in Rhode Island, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean onto the border with Connecticut

Built in 1868, rebuilt in 2010, the site for filming in 1916 of "American Aristocracy," starring Douglas Fairbanks

We took the opportunity of a partial weekend off from our training of the wonderful butlers to visit a museum for the “tobacco valley” that stretches from Connecticut to Massachusetts and the lower tip of Vermont. This is the source of the world’s finest cigar wrapper leaves, made so by the sandy soil fed by minerals from the river that flows through, the climate, and the know-how of the farmers. Early European settlers had found Native Americans smoking tobacco in pipes, and it was not until General Putnam returned from the Caribbean puffing on a Cuban in 1763 (a couple of centuries before the embargo) that the idea of rolling leaves into a cigar shape was introduced to New England. Shortly thereafter, farmers grew Shoestring, then Broadleaf, and Havana Seed for the binders and wrappers of cigars. Within a century, however, they were losing “wrapper market” share to a fine-grained but large leaf imported from Sumatra. Growing this leaf in the New England climate proved impractical until researchers realized the steamy Sumatran climate was also characterized by extensive cloud cover, compared with the blazing summer sun in Connecticut. Researchers then created the needed microclimate by using shade tents of muslin cloth, thereby reducing sunlight and raising humidity. The first tent went up in 1900 and within two decades, acreage of these white-tented fields had risen to 30,800. By the turn of the following century, the acreage stood at 2,000 on a mere two-dozen farms.
What had changed?
In 1953, some bright spark found that grinding tobacco leaves into fine pieces and then mixing them with an adhesive, made paper-like sheets of “tobacco” that was used first for cigar binders and later for wrappers. The demand for quality tobacco leaf dropped as consumers became hooked on these cheaper “glue cigars,” the equivalent of the building industry’s particleboard. And so those farms of muslin turned into nurseries, houses, industrial parks, and shopping centers.
The good news is that acreage devoted to the exquisite Connecticut wrapper leaf has increased 50% recently as demand increases again for quality cigars. The seven-month growing season still has the leaves sent to the Dominican Republic for curing for a year, returned to Connecticut for two years of fermentation, and thence down to Jamaica, which supplied many of the farm workers to Connecticut in years gone by, for rolling.

A worthwhile visit for any cigar aficionado, the museum can be found in Windsor, Connecticut. Here is a tobacco drying shed with vents to control temperatures

And while you are up in this beautiful region, you might want to tour the many local vineyards for tastings of Connecticut wine…we certainly spent a happy, windblown but sunny Sunday doing just that.

We tasted only Connecticut wines and found the whites very satisfactory indeed. The one red available, a Cabernet Franc, we found two-dimensional.

With the Ocean House butlers graduating,

Ladies and gentlemen with hearts of gold

it is time to make the three-day journey back home. Stopped off in the arts and crafts center of Ashville in North Carolina to celebrate our 29th anniversary with a hike in the Blue Ridge mountains made the more intense by the rain storm that descended: there’s a certain freedom to walking through the rain with the colors and smells coming out strongly.

Dinner at the award-winning Market Place restaurant on Wall Street was followed by a tour around the arts and crafts shops, all the while serenaded by street musicians, including one rather funky and upbeat band playing a singing saw (a violin bow played over a wood saw that is bent to change its pitch) and washbasin-and-string double bass.

Another stopover in Savannah, Georgia and The Sapphire Grill for dinner made the trip back to Tampa palatable. We preferred to drive rather than go through the enervating process of air travel and car rentals; and so we could see the country…there is so much to North America; and so I could catch up on projects on my laptop as we took turns driving. We experienced petrol/gas price fluctuating between $2.61 and $3.25. That’s quite a spread. We stayed in 2-5-Star hotels, an equally wide spread of service levels and offerings. Standards can certainly be raised. The worst service was provided in a hotel that overcharged and delivered little, and which was owned by investors, not hoteliers. Perhaps there is a correlation between motive, passion, and service levels?

Categories
Published Articles

Don’t Just Sit There—Addressing the Economy

Just from my recent experience with batteries, I have to say, “Thank goodness life is not made in China.” The cell phones my carrier mandates are made in China. After two months, the first battery could hold no charge. The earlier phones were made elsewhere and lasted seven years. Similarly, the 17-inch Apple laptop made in Taiwan and purchased eight years ago is still going strong with its original battery operating at 70% capacity. The Chinese-made 17-inch Apple laptop bought two years ago is already on its third battery.

Some of us prefer to pay for well-made products that operate effectively, yet when we try to buy a cell phone, landline phone (or almost anything else you care to name) that has not been made in China (usually with as many short cuts as possible to maximize profits) it proves practically impossible. The ubiquity of it all makes for a grim shopping experience.

Extrapolating into the hospitality world, imagine if hotel ratings were adjusted so that two-stars were reported as five-stars because occupancy rates were insufficient in “higher-end” hotels to justify the service levels of “old-style” five-stars.

Well?

China is not the target of this little question, by the way—it takes two to tango: if the West did not demand cheap, then manufacturers would not close down their US and European operations (and economies) and move to the Far East. One could say the same about street drugs: No demand, no traffic from Columbia, Afghanistan, etc. We have brought these conditions upon ourselves.

Take the current economic collapse. China didn’t create that, although the new US Treasury Secretary, Mr. Geithner, implied as much recently regarding their alleged currency manipulation and factual underwriting of the US housing boom with their subsequent excesses of cash. No, it was people like Mr. Geithner who did, simply by being ignorant of the fundamentals of economics, espousing instead theories so arcane and abstruse as to turn a simple subject into a cult with membership only for the cognoscenti (knowledgeable). Again, my intent is not to target or finger point individuals when it has been a group effort that has led us down this path. Instead, my gnarly (knobbly) fingers are pointing at the lack of a manual for life that highlights fundamentals; in this particular case, regarding economics.

What a mish mash of half-baked ideas, what a sea of information that does nothing but confuse by its contradictions and impracticalities! No wonder we seem to muddle our way from one crisis to another. Mankind is not pre-ordained to succeed, but intelligent action goes a long way toward improving our chances. So, what is intelligent, what is fundamental, about managing economies?

I don’t normally write about economics: as a trainer of butlers around the world, I usually sit down to write on subjects relating to quality of service and subjects that impact butlers. I have not written an article for the last five months, because the subject that seems be front-and-center for hotels focusing on quality of service has been this financial vortex we are sitting in front of, mesmerized, wondering how much longer, and how deep, it will spin. In a way, butler trainers could be regarded among the canaries in the mine of hospitality. For when funds become tight and hotels hunker down, training, together with marketing and PR, are the first things to find themselves on the backburner.

Reviewing conversations over the last three months with GMs, HMs, HR Directors, and butlers, the trend conceivably points to butlers in hospitality as an endangered species. Maybe high-end hotels able to afford the perks and luxuries of old are an endangered species, too. One article written recently showed that affluent travelers are still traveling. There will always be enough wealth to allow some to travel, but how many large, high-end hotels will be able to survive on the basis of the numbers who will still be able to travel, and be willing and able to pay extra for the perks? By reducing rates by 70% and putting on hold everything but bare essentials, many luxury hotels are being forced to do the equivalent of not supplying soap and shampoo that some low-end hotels are now resorting to.

When the financial markets, with their derivatives and packaging of junk assets into “valuable assets” by a process of necromancy (black magic), created US $1.4 quadrillion in wealth that is suddenly without value, one can see that trying to create a soft landing by making the real world economy (you know, people doing an honest day’s work) absorb such a sum, is not a possible feat and not a bright direction to be moving in. That’s why this article is about the economy, rather than the quality of service. Because the latter cannot exist in the absence of the former, and I’d hate to see the ground gained over the last three decades lost for want of an understanding of basics by our betters.

Kindergarten Economics

Money is a symbol that allows us to move away from the restrictions of bartering. To have value, we have to consider that currency has value: we have to believe that the money is exchangeable, and not just Monopoly® paper, and that it’s value will not erode.

The supply of money has to balance the amount of product in the market place, otherwise inflation (too much money) or deflation (too little money) result. When the Federal Reserve stopped reporting M2 (the money-supply statistic) in the U.S. about three years ago, they effectively hid just how much new money they were creating.

An economy relies on real products and services being produced, which are then exchanged for money. When a large portion of the economy is froth (money made by creating extra “value” out of paper money), then a) production is not encouraged or rewarded, b) the country produces less and less, and c) the economy bankrupts. The reverse is true, too: valuable products and services produced result in a truly booming economy.

If the creation of money is in the hands of the government (per the US Constitution), then it will be managed for the common good by administrators appointed as public servants to execute the will of the democratically elected government. If, however, it is in the hands of private groups, such as the Federal Reserve in the U.S., then money creation will be used for the benefit of that private group, just as any company will look after its interests, and that group will control the government. This has been true for the last 800 years, ever since the Venetian bankers took control of European countries by bankrupting them over the Crusades—that they initiated covertly through Church officials (who spoke to the Kings who then began the wars against Muslims that they had, up to that time, lived with peaceably in the main).

Don’t spend money you do not have, or have backed by real assets. A debt is not an asset, it is a debt. The apparent genius of modern banking and corporate accounting is that it can claim a debt is really an asset.

There are other fundamentals, but if the above had been in place, we would not now be in a pickle. We have all benefited from this half-baked state of affairs, in that those made wealthy through economic fudging have spread that wealth into our hotels and pockets. But, like the person who buys Chinese products because that is all that is available, and so helps collapse his own economy, we should not beat ourselves up for other people’s transgressions and excesses. Recognizing the root of the problem and taking effective action would be more productive.

Meaning…?

Well, let’s start by demanding that elected officials work with other governments to cancel the US$1.4 quadrillion in financial-froth-debts by those who gamble with and manipulate money instead of earning it; and demand they revamp the world’s financial system. Support any actions designed to bring back real productivity to the economy. Maybe demand that the high-flying business colleges, universities, and think tanks, start teaching and thinking with fundamentals.

And perhaps more than anything, let’s support any activities that nurture morals and ethics, because, if we look for the fundamental fundamental (in life, not just economics), which is behind this financial maelstrom we find ourselves in, it is that we would all be better off if we looked out for the other guy as well, not just for ourselves. The people reading this article do not have this problem, but I’ll wager those who try to enrich themselves by taking much and giving back nothing of value to society, are laboring under the misapprehension that happiness results.

This article moves beyond the “mere” managing of a hotel, but at this stage, we need to do something (as it is our economy, too, and does impact our microcosm), instead of waiting or expecting others with perhaps a too-complicated grasp of their subject, to bring more of the same solutions to bear.

Published in:

  • Airline News Resource (www.airlinenewsresource.com)
  • http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/news/newsroom/detail.html?sid=36925
  • http://www.hotelonline.com/News/PR2009_1st/Feb09_EconomyHotels.html
  • http://www.4hoteliers.com/4hots_fshw.php?mwi=3747
  • http://www.younghotelier.com/articles-reviews/the-economy-explained-don’t-just-sit-there
  • http://www.hotelnewsresource.com/article36925.html
  • http://www.htrends.com/trends-detail-sid-36563.html
  • http://www.thetalentjungle.com/hospitality_blog
  • http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news//4039739.html
  • Hotelexecutive.com