Category: Published Articles
What is Behind the Gyrations of the World Economy and Where is It Going?
Do yourself a favor and skip this article if you prefer to think the ship is simply rolling heavily in the calm seas. The captain of the Good Ship Earth, I am afraid, has a very definite agenda that is taking it off the course everyone thinks it is on as they go about their [...]
The Long-Term Worldwide Impacts of Fukushima Daiichi’s Nuclear Cataclysm
Is it or isn’t it? Fukushima. Is it a non-issue for all but those living around the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, as governments and obliging media have been saying; or are the meltdowns spreading invisible tentacles of radioactive death around the world, as some are insisting and others are wondering, a sense of unease at [...]
Luxury Hotels: The Butler is here to Stay, But will the Guests be Happy Driving Fords?
“If hotels can have ridiculous things like butlers, they can certainly have bed bug inspectors,” bemoaned one hotel magazine editor in December, 2010. This might well be the epitaph for butler service in hotels, as it is too commonly practiced: in booming Asia, seemingly one-for-one, butler training programs have gone to the cheapest bidder who, [...]
Butler Service Today Five Leading Hotels Share their Secret
Why have butler service in a hotel? In the cases canvassed, there were two basic reasons: either because the hotel owners conceived they had the best property in the world/on the PGA tour/etc. and they believed the corollary on the service side could only be supplied by the addition of butlers. Or because they wanted [...]
Green Hotels, Butler Service, Oxymoronic, or Two Sides of the Same Coin?
The drive to go green by hotels comes not so much from environmental concerns as from economic considerations. How then, does an expensive butler department fit into this fundamental drive to balance shrinking budgets? Perhaps a more fundamental question could be visited first: is there still a demand for luxury in the hospitality world? This [...]
When You Already Offer the Best, What Else is There?
Two clients contact you, wanting to arrange their wedding and honeymoon in some suitably exotic location. Once their wish list has been communicated, you formulate options. One of the options you may want to be thinking with and offering them, is a location that, in addition to everything else, also offers butler service. Why? Because [...]
Poor People Skills and the Wealthy
In the best of all possible worlds, people would be rational and compassionate. As this is Planet Earth, a few people walk amongst us who live slightly south of this ideal. Anyone working in private service or the luxury hotel market can probably tell a tale or two about the wealthy they have served, either [...]
Brand Butler: Infusing the Butler into Hotel Brands
Butlers first began to appear in hotels a quarter of a century ago. However, they have been in service for a millennium and have become synonymous with the highest level of service to employers and guests alike. How butlers reached such giddy heights is not the subject of this article, but how their standards of [...]
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 [...]
Ethics? That’s HR – I’m busy with Guests
It was somewhat disappointing to return for another round of training at a particular five-star hotel a year after training the butlers, only to find that, in this case, little had been implemented from the year before and morale was in the basement, with staff at each others’ throats and quite a few leaving or [...]
