A couple of nights ago Chantal and I were out at a local restaurant, invitees to a tasting of the chef’s new menu offerings. These tastings are semi-regular events in a ski-cum-restaurant town like Stowe: innkeepers and concierges from some of the swankier inns and larger hotels are wined and dined with the hope that they’ll send guests to that restaurant more frequently than they send guests to other restaurants. On this night, the food was spectacular, the wines excellent, the company extraordinary. It made me wonder what we were doing there.
It’s not that we never send guests to restaurants of that quality. In fact, with Christmas week just a few days away, it’s important for us to think about dining options for our visitors. Though we’ve positioned ourselves as Stowe’s meat-and-potatoes B&B, during the holidays people like to splurge a little, so it’s well worth our time to subject ourselves to an outstanding dining experience, if only to satisfy the research requirement. So we gleefully tolerated the lobster bisque with saffron, tender venison with a lingonberry reduction, and an apple tart thingy washed down with ice cider--which, if you haven’t had it, is like a Highland single malt Scotch crossed with Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream.
Between courses and satisfied murmurings, conversation among tourist industry professionals turned into a little shop talk. The gentleman sitting across the table from me, who was employed by one of the larger resorts, easily had the most entertaining story of the evening. He told of the time when one of his guests--a statuesque blonde from one of Russia’s former protectorates--accosted him one day with her laptop.
“Make internet work,” she demanded, in her best Ivan Drago voice. The gentleman, eager to please after separating madame from several hundred dollars per night, applied to the task and flipped open her laptop, only to find himself confronted with the Cyrillic alphabet. Hmmm, he thought, how difficult can it be to find the “connect to internet” button. He smiled and cheerfully began tapping away. Finally, after several minutes and much huffing on madame’s part, voila, the machine logged onto the hotel’s wireless signal. The gentleman triumphantly returned the laptop to its owner, who marched away, presumably satisfied.
As the owner and operator of my own business, it’s hard for me to get my head around this story. My hat’s off to the gentleman for throwing himself at the challenge, and for succeeding. He takes his job seriously, and it shows: he’s the best. I’m a far more imperfect man. But the exchange makes me wonder: does the amount of money involved in a transaction warrant the behavior of the principals? Or is there room for degrees of difference?
Regular readers of this blog know that faced with the same situation, I would not have allowed madame in the front door. Then again, madame’s driver probably exceeded the speed limit as she passed the Auberge on her way to Luxuryville--that’s to say she’d never stay here...unless, or course, her sugar daddy drops her, and she only has enough money to stay at a place like the Auberge. Perhaps I’m being a bit extreme (it’s my blog) but price-shifting is a phenomenon we’re well acquainted with. Over the past three years, we’ve seen many new guests come through our doors happily relating how in the past they shelled out twice as much to stay elsewhere, but now they were happy to stay with us in order to save a few quid.
The Auberge and its ilk will always be here. When young couples or families don’t have a lot of money to spend and they’re looking for affordable accommodations, we’re here. When their earning power increases and they can afford to stay at luxury places where slamming down a laptop and saying, “Make internet work!” is acceptable, we’re here. And when those same people are pinched by their pocketbooks, but they still want to enjoy Stowe, we’re here. Imperfect, uneven, impertinent, we’re here.
I’m reminded of that great scene in Charles Portis’s novel True Grit, when the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf suggests that he considered kissing the story’s fourteen-year-old girl and narrator Mattie Ross. Mattie retorts LaBoeuf’s abuse of authority by telling the Ranger his untoward advances will be met with justice. This angers LaBoeuf, and in a moment of foreshadowing, he tells Mattie that she’s crossed a line. But Mattie is undeterred; she dismisses the Ranger with a tossed-off line that maintains her humanity and dignity. It’s a lesson we try to apply not only to all the transactions here at the Auberge, but in all phases of our lives, where petty demands can’t be satisfied by the shifting of a decimal point.
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