A Shout-Out To The Hotel Concierge

Before there was the internet, there was the hotel concierge.  

He (or she) was the one you saw to make that hard-to-get dinner reservation, or tickets to that sold-out show.  It was the concierge who knew what plays and events were in town, what the most popular restaurants are, and ready to respond to a thousand questions with a thousand answers.

Having suffered plenty of PTSD from watching my beloved hospitality industry reduced to a shell of its former self because of the Corona Virus, it was inevitable I would encounter some form of post-pandemic anxiety.  But I didn't think I would have been so affected as I was at seeing major hotels outsource, and otherwise dismantle, their concierge desks.

As the hospitality industry has been altered by the pandemic in heretofore unknown ways, one of the sad casualties is the hotel concierge desk.  Begun before the pandemic, and accelerated since then, the hotel concierge is rapidly becoming an endangered species.  Yet we still need them!

Some short-sighted industry leaders have claimed that the concierge is superfluous in the era of the internet, yet I have personally experienced guests who came to my concierge desk with dozens of pages.  Often printed out from Yelp or Trip Advisor.

One particular visitor entered, 'best Chinese Restaurants,' and plopped down on my desk a stack of papers the size of a phone book.  He discovered there are a lot of Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, and came to me to help him figure out which one of the thousand options he printed to go to.  Let us not forget how restaurants have been known to troll their competitors, so it is often up to a learned individual to help the guest figure it out.  

One of the many sources of information utilized by the hotel concierge

As the trend began before the pandemic, I personally know a concierge (whom I hired many years ago) who worked for a boutique hotel in San Francisco.  He worked for a decade in one of San Francisco’s oldest hotels, and found that his commitment to the job was rewarded by being replaced with a concierge kiosk.  I kid you not.  The sad reality is that this is becoming all too frequent with smaller, mid-sized hotels under 300 rooms.

The Hyatt Regency San Francisco is the Hyatt's flagship property in the city, and its unique atrium-designed interior has even been prominently utilized in Hollywood movies.  In February of 2023, I was attending the San Francisco Writers Conference at the Hyatt Regency and started "talking shop" with their concierge while I was between sessions.  

Most concierge desks offer a variety of sightseeing tour options, but to my surprise, there was only one offered; Big Bus Sightseeing Tours.  They are what we in the profession call a HO-HO tour (Hop On- Hop Off).  When I asked the concierge why only one company's brochures were displayed, she informed me that Big Bus Sightseeing Tours manages the desk.

Wha?!

Having an outside company manage a concierge desk in a fancy, name-band hotel, was considered anathema to big chains at one time.  It's like going to the name-dropped, French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley, only to learn it was being managed by Denny's.  

One of the many hotel concierge desks I have work at over the years

But the pandemic changed all that.  

After bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars, and in an austerity night-sweat, the hotel industry did (and is doing) everything it could to recoup costs.  Regardless of the optics, The Hyatt Regency San Francisco is clearly not bothered by it.

If finding more outsourced concierge desks didn't worry me enough, then finding them removed altogether was even more of a jaw-dropper.  

In January of 2023, I happened to be walking by the Marriott Marquis Hotel, the flagship property for Marriott in San Francisco.  It is nicked named the 'Jukebox' because of the alluvial fan-shaped cornice atop its 39 floors.  Ironically it opened on October 16th, 1989.  A day before the 7.1 Loma Prieta Earthquake.  I remembered one of my favorite concierge, Dan Callahan, had worked there for decades and I recently stopped by to see what happened to him.

I expected to find a concierge desk altered by the events of the last four years, but what I did not expect to find was that the concierge desk was removed altogether!  They also eliminated the doorman position as well.  I asked a security guard standing in the busy lobby what to do if a guest in this convention center-adjacent hotel, wants a restaurant recommendation?  She said she was told to inform anyone with questions like that to go online and look it up.

Yet another of the many concierge desks I worked at over the years.

Imagine you are a keynote speaker at a major convention and you are staying at the Marriott Marquis.  You want to dine with a couple of colleagues, go to the lobby for a recommendation from the concierge, only to find a polite, but uninformed security guard who tells you to look it up.

And that's OK?

This honorable and noble profession (craft, really) of the hotel concierge may seem superfluous in the 21st century.  However what do you do when you are in a city you have never been to before, you don't know where anything is, you have to entertain clients or family, and you have only the internet to rely on?  

Or, if you are a tourist in a city for the first time and you want to visit a popular attraction which is difficult to get to?  You have to rely on public transportation or the GPS in your rental car?

That learned individual behind the concierge desk who knows where the bad neighborhoods are, which restaurants are good and which ones are trolled online by their competitors, suddenly seems a little more necessary.

In the rush to cut off their noses despite their face, the larger hotel chains would do well remembering  that rich, important, and paying hotel guests are there because they are on vaction or for work.  They don't want to be self-empowered and have to figure it out for themselves. 

They want to pick up the phone and get their questions answered.  Because if you are spending $500 to $5000 a night, you don't want to be told, "You look it up."