How many times have you entered a luxury hotel through the staff entrance? Probably, like me, never. And how many luxury hotels would invite you through that way?
Simon Casson, general manager of the Four Seasons Resort Dubai at Jumeirah Beach, which opened last year, is fired up to do so. Granted, we’re here as a press group attending the day-long Four Seasons University, along with nine of its general managers in the region, designed to give us a behind-the-scenes look at “what goes into creating the perfect Four Seasons stay ... and how we look for different ways to constantly surprise and delight guests”.
Or as Christian Clerc, Four Seasons’ president of hotel operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, puts it in his introductory lecture: “When you have nothing to hide, you allow people to come see what happens backstage.”
With four properties in the GCC, including the recently opened Four Seasons Bahrain Bay, and several more to come, including, next year, the Four Seasons Abu Dhabi, an event highlighting optimal service standards is timely.
It’s a significant gesture; just as a beautiful dress may not make a woman beautiful, it does at least demonstrate that she knows a thing or two about beauty.“A hotel is very much like a great Swiss watch,” Casson says. Inside there are a lot of cogs and wheels that make it work.”
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And he should know, having started off as a dishwasher in his village restaurant in Wales and worked his way up in the hospitality industry, 26 of his years with the Four Seasons, where he’s now also regional vice president. He personally met the hotel’s 500 workers before hiring them, travelling to their 35 home countries, and he talks passionately about treating them humanely, encouraging them to be themselves and maintaining a connection with them.
We drive up to the staff entrance on a bus, one of seven that bring them from their accommodation near Jebel Ali throughout each day. To enter this way, it’s impossible to ignore the Four Seasons ethos, as articulated by its founder and chairman, Isadore Sharp, who started off with a motor hotel in Toronto in 1961. The four pillars of service, quality, culture and brand are posted one word per different coloured board at the entrance. Inside the first door is a quote from Kahlil Gibran, chosen by Casson from The Prophet, which was given to him by his mother when he left home at 17: “And what is it to work with love? It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.”
In case you miss that thoroughly poetic point, on the next door past the security office is written in big artistic fonts: “Through these doors enter the finest employees in the world.”
And on the wall inside that door is the face of Sharp, spelling out the four pillars: basically to operate and build a brand of “medium-sized hotels of exceptional quality”, in which “true luxury will be defined not by architecture or decor, but by service” and to develop a “service culture” with a work ethic based on the Golden Rule. As Clerc told us earlier: “The Golden Rule is you treat guests how you want to be treated.”
In one of two brightly decorated staff lounges, Casson hands us over to non-management staff and encourages us to ask them frank questions on our tour. “To go from good to great is all about people,” he says. “This business is one of exceptionally hard work.”
And so we walk through those rooms where that hard work takes place, where everyone greets us with eye contact and smiles (there are signs about the importance of that, too): past housekeeping and the laundry room, which promises one-hour pressing and four-hour express washing; and the room-service kitchen, with its tables on rollers lined up in the hall outside. Clerc tells us the Four Seasons pioneered the concept of 24/7 room service and one-hour pressing, among other innovations such as providing luxury toiletries and the Four Seasons bed, the latest evolution of which comes with adjustable toppers, as demonstrated in our seven-minute bed-making session, so guests can request soft, medium or firm (and if they like it, they can buy it).
All of this is fine and good in principle, but how does it work unscripted? I’m sceptical because after a run of smooth service the day before, I plonked myself poolside and pressed the service button three separate times during what seemed like an intolerable wait for a mocktail. I’m sure you’ve been there: you start off all shiny and new in the lap of luxury and in a snap turn into a spoilt brat over something insignifcant, a reasonable person pulled into a state of unreasonableness.
It was a tiny cog in the machine, the lifeguard, who spotted me straining to be recognised, and flagged a server. A man named Islam came over and I complained nicely, as we Canadians do, about being ignored. He apologised and after delivering my order, urged me to “come back tomorrow” so he could make it up to me.
So after our tour, I return to my spot. I don’t press the button because I’m thinking “bring it on, Islam”, defying him not to notice me. Well, after a few minutes, he comes over and says he hopes he’s not disturbing me, but can he bring me a special mocktail? He returns with a towering strawberry drink with a blueberry skewer, insisting that it’s on the house because of yesterday’s bad service. Now, instead of combative, I just feel guilty. I explain that’s not necessary; the service wasn’t that bad. “For Four Seasons, it was too bad,” he smiles.
In a country that is almost immune to the inevitable service failures, Islam’s gesture makes me think about how the true test lies in the recovery. And that maybe there is something to this Golden Rule; not just in how we as guests get treated by hotel staff, but in how we treat them, too. Another lesson learnt at Four Seasons University.
