The people who run the world’s best hotels and the people who manage private wealth and advise families serve the same client. He or she has already bought everything that can be bought, and can tell within a minute whether the person across the desk is paying attention. The book I wrote says nothing about banking or law. Its eighty interviews are with hoteliers and chefs. But a general manager who has spent thirty years receiving this client has learned things a relationship manager or a partner would pay for, and this page sets out what I think they are.
The client who already has everything
Gerrit Graef, then at The Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, told me that if his hotel were merely a hotel, the guest would find the same product for less elsewhere, and Sjefke Jansen at the Belmond Grand Hotel Europe said that selling a commodity is easy and offering something authentic is the hard part. A private bank’s custody platform and a law firm’s precedents are commodities in this sense, and the client knows it. What they are paying for is being understood by a competent person who thought about them before the meeting began.
Recognition and the guest history
Amit Majumder, then at Jumeirah Vittaveli in the Maldives, gave me the definition of luxury I quote most often, and the second half is the part to dwell on.
“True luxury is having what you’re merely thinking about be presented to you before you voice that desire. Every luxury brand invests in, and creates, mechanisms to track the preferences of their guests, but what sets each of them apart is how that information is used.” Amit Majumder, then general manager, Jumeirah Vittaveli
Few firms use their system of record the way a great hotel uses the guest history, which is to brief the person who will meet the client on what matters to that client today. Taljinder Singh described the expectation he was held to as a young hotelier at the Taj in Mumbai.
“I was expected to know the history of the top 250 guests of the hotel, verbatim.” Taljinder Singh, then General Manager, The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai
A relationship manager with forty families should be able to meet the same bar. The system holds the balance sheet. The manager should hold the daughter’s wedding, and the house in Provence that the client mentioned in March and has not raised since. Philip Barnes at The Savoy warned that a guest history is a snapshot, and that what was true last time has to be validated this time. The hoteliers do this by asking. Axel Bethke in Abu Dhabi said conversation is the best way to understand a guest’s preferences. Most client meetings are built around what the professional wants to present. The hotel version is built around what the professional wants to learn.
Restraint and discretion
The second thing this client values, after being known, is not being shown that they are known. The hotels in the book hold a great deal of private information and display almost none of it. A guest’s preferences arrive in the room as a glass of the right wine, with no announcement that a file was consulted. Christian Hassing in Singapore said that for a guest who is connected every waking hour, going offline is the new luxury. A private client who comes to a bank or a law firm wants the same thing: to be handled by someone who knows, and who will never say how much.
A hotel’s discretion is about taste. A professional’s discretion is also a duty the hotel never carries. The hotelier’s lesson is narrower, and it concerns manner: how to know a great deal and let none of it show.
The relationship manager as concierge
Alexander van Gastel at the Pulitzer Amsterdam told me the concierge is now chief curator, and Bethke said his staff have a personal network the internet cannot mimic. This is the role the best relationship managers already play without calling it that. The client needs someone who knows which specialist to call, and which request to decline gently because it will cost the client more than they think. Ayman Gharib at Raffles Dubai once flew a regular guest’s butler to a sister hotel overseas so that a familiar face would be waiting on arrival. The equivalent is the partner who walks the family into the meeting with the new adviser, rather than sending an introduction by email.
Recovery when a promise is missed
Promises get missed in every firm. The hoteliers treat this moment as the one on which the relationship turns. Anneke Brown, then at COMO The Treasury in Perth, was blunt about what is owed.
“When a luxury experience goes wrong, you need to correct it, and compensate without question.” Anneke Brown, then general manager of COMO The Treasury, Perth
Alexander Pichel in Jakarta set out the order: hear the complaint fully, apologise honestly, offer a solution. The order matters because professionals are trained to explain, and an explanation offered before the client has finished reads as a defence. The account that quietly moves to a competitor eighteen months after a missed promise nobody raised is the private client version of the hotel complaint that first surfaces in an online review. The hotel’s protection is a culture in which the person who notices the failure has the authority to fix it that day, and the habit of asking the client, in person, how things are.
What the firm will never do
The last discipline in the book is identity, and it is the one firms neglect most. The hoteliers in the book know what their house will never do, however much the guest pays. Mahmoud Skaf at The Ritz-Carlton Kuala Lumpur spoke of never saying no to a request, and the same hoteliers refuse anything that compromises another guest or the staff. Albert Adrià in Barcelona put the balance as staying as pure as possible while trying to evolve. A firm that cannot say what it will never do for a client, in writing and in the hearing of its youngest associate, will eventually be asked to do it by the client who has grown used to hearing yes.
The Field Guide follows each of these disciplines through the hoteliers’ and chefs’ own accounts, and the Toolkit offers the guest history and the complaint log in forms a client team can adapt. That is where the practice begins.