A sociology of luxury hotels got under way a little over fifteen years ago when a young American sociologist worked successively in two famous establishments to learn about the class struggles in her country from bossy guests and stubborn employees.
Rachel Sherman, who now teaches in New York, did not achieve this goal at the time, since relations with the hotel public were relatively conflict-free.
But instead, she managed to create a case study of one of the most amazing organizations imaginable.
Most organizations see themselves as serving their non-members, providing them with cars and refrigerators, medical treatment, and conflict resolution.
The official duties of the members of the organization thus contain diverted requests from the public.
But that doesn't mean, of course, that any non-member could come and decide independently about such duties.
Rather, it is up to the supervisor and ultimately the system management to do this.
They select what is offered to the clientele, and the individual client finds himself bound by this preselection.
Even the common hotel guest today only chooses between standardized offers and additional services, often by self-service at the minibar, coffee machine and buffet.
Different in a luxury hotel.
Here even the most unusual wish of a guest is binding for the employees.
Negative legends say that some guests expect true miracles, while positive legends tell porters that they can pull them off: How do you organize a diva's train journey when the train drivers are on strike?
And like the shower of flowers over the lover of a regular guest, when not only two thousand rose petals, but also a helicopter and an available pilot have to be brought in, and both within a day?
The special requests of regular guests
After deducting the exceptional, such questions are also legitimate in terms of organizational sociology: How can one prevent employees from being crushed between the mutually uncoordinated wishes, time concepts and sensitivities of their guests?
A first answer lies in the overabundance of staff.
It is not uncommon for there to be three hundred permanent employees for every one hundred guests.
This, in turn, makes slack times a problem for all big hotels, and to solve it, they're offering rooms for those on a budget, at least in America.
Nevertheless, the working hours can be short at any time, even if only one of the guests comes up with something particularly unreasonable.
The hotel staff therefore know how to be brief in conversations with less demanding guests,
without them noticing.
In this way, they generate reserves of free time, which can then be partly enjoyed as such and partly mobilized in an emergency.
Another effective protection against the wild wishes of the guests lies in the care with which their preferences, once shown, are recorded and memorized.
We are therefore prepared for the special requests of regular guests even before they arrive, and before a well-known name visits for the first time, asking other hotels replaces looking at one's own files.
Under these circumstances, anyone who quickly changes their preferences becomes an object of despair.
The stranger's unfamiliarity with local conditions makes him dependent on the advice of the staff, who often recommend the best solution which is the easiest for them.
For example, one of the guests Sherman interviewed was recommended the hotel's restaurant for dinner, boldly but successfully arguing that anywhere else he would only find tourists.
But even with being served, most guests have no original experience.
The domestic staff has also long since disappeared from the homes of the income millionaires because it would disturb the intimacy that is also sought there.
Therefore, the temporary masters must first be trained by their temporary servants, and this creates this influence on the learning objectives.
Perhaps the most important of these is not to spoil the gentlemen.
In this way, the guest who shows up an hour before the promised availability of his room is made to wait even if the room is actually ready for occupancy.
Rachel Sherman, Class Acts: “Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels,” Berkeley 2007; Lewis A. Coser, Servants: “The Obsolescence of an Occupational Role,” in Social Forces 52(1973), pp. 31-40.