Boutique hotels

A boutique hotel sells a point of view. The guest is not buying a room in a category, they are buying somebody’s taste — in the building, the linen, the breakfast, the music, the way the door is answered — and they can tell within the first hour whether that taste is being actively held or merely inherited from whoever set the place up.

It is also a property with no bench. Twelve rooms cannot carry a duty manager, a night manager and a head of housekeeping, so the same three or four people are the entire experience, and one of them being off changes the property rather than the roster. A guest never knows which day they arrived on. They only know what they got.

Which is why it is assessed on an ordinary day, with no notice, no relationship and no allowance made — and why the account describes the hotel as it runs when nobody in it is compensating for the fact that somebody is watching.

• Owner-operators who cannot be a guest of their own hotel, because everybody in it recognises them.
• Small hotels where a single review moves a month’s occupancy and nobody is certain what produced it.
• Anyone who has handed the day-to-day to a manager and has not stayed since.

• Whether the point of view you designed is what a stranger actually encounters.
• What your hotel is like on the day the person who usually holds it together is not there.
• Which parts of the stay read as considered, and which read as improvised.
• What a guest called your hotel three days later, in their own words, to somebody who had never been.