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A Guide to Hotel Doublespeak
The Travel Critic · May 17, 2000

I had just finished the most expensive lunch of my life at the chichi Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, when I glanced at the clock and noticed I was late for an appointment. An hour late.

I sprinted to the lobby and zeroed in on the concierge desk. "Please," I gasped at the young attendant who looked as if he was dressed for a St. Patrick's Day parade. "I need the phone number for the observatory in Green Bank. I'm late for a meeting."

The employee slowly bent over and picked up a phone directory from under the desk.

"Perhaps," he sniffed as he slid the book across the counter, "you'd care to look it up yourself?"

I couldn't believe him. Here, at this five-diamond property, they were hitting me with the book? I'd understand if this were the No-Tell Motel (to borrow a phrase from Garrison Keillor), but at a property like the Greenbrier, where room rates start at nearly $500 a night, I would expect a concierge to drive me to the observatory.

Then again, what a hotel says and what it means are increasingly becoming two very different things.

Call this linguistic phenomenon "hotelese" if you want to be nice about it and "lying" if you don't. Everything from a hotel's definition of a concierge - which, by the way, is derived from a Latin word meaning "fellow slave" - to its amorphous concept of customer service is subject to the obfuscating influence of hotelese.

For example:

Hotelese: "For your convenience."

Plain speak: "For our convenience."

I discovered this while visiting Little Palm Island in the Florida Keys last year. It's a great resort if you like seclusion, shelling out $400 for dinner and fending off mosquitoes that have developed a taste for blue blood. For my "convenience," the property added an 18 percent gratuity to each purchase I made on the cramped hideaway - a practice of which I remained ignorant until presented with the bill.

I didn't think it was so convenient, especially since I had already tipped everyone along the way. So why not say the practice is "for the hotel's convenience" instead of for the guest's? Maybe it wouldn't have the same disingenuously servile ring to it.

Hotelese: "Amenity."

Plain speak: "More money for us."

Go ahead, try substituting "amenity" with "more money for us" and you'll be well on your way to understanding hotelese. For example, two-line "dataports" are one of the most common amenities offered by a property. Frequent travelers supposedly love the dual jacks because they can make a phone call and surf the Internet or receive a fax at the same time. What a deal.

But two lines imply adequate infrastructure to handle all the extra calls; considering the fact that hotel chains like Hilton and Starwood sock guests with surcharges of up to 10 cents a minute for longer calls because they need to pay for new capacity, dual dataports can hardly be considered an amenity. They're really a reverse subsidy at best - and a moneymaking opportunity at worst.

Hotelese: "Help yourself to the minibar."

Plain speak: "Let us pick your pocket."

Once again, I urge you to run a mental translation next time the nice lady at the check-in desk invites you to indulge in the minibar. When I checked into Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, California, a few weeks ago, I discovered the minibar price list and almost mistook it for the room-service menu. The charges were easily 300 percent above retail (A candy bar for $4.75? C'mon!). Unlike Little Palm and the Greenbrier, I actually like Shutters a great deal, but with profit margins on these overpriced refrigerators averaging 35 percent, can't it cut guests a little slack?

Next time the check-in clerk beckons you to help yourself, leave the minibar key on the counter and brown-bag it. With room rates starting at about $400 at Shutters, you'll probably need all the money you save.

Here's a way around hotelese: A few years ago, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission urged publicly traded companies to begin printing their documents in plain English so people could understand them. Maybe we need the government to do the same with hotels.

Once we cut through all the jargon, perhaps guests will see these properties for what they are - businesses that would probably charge them for the air they breathe if they could - and they'll prepare themselves accordingly.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.