I was haggling with United Airlines’ customer service representatives over frequent flyer status last week, and started musing on the differences between how hotels and airlines treat different classes of customers.
Airlines have a mystique to maintain, the sense that even though your travel experience isn’t all that glamorous, somebody’s is. You see it in the airport with the imposing doors to the club lounges, so that the unworthy can imagine the luxurious goings on inside. Those who pass through those doors, however, are greeted by a security desk where documentation will be scrutinized in search of a reason to turn them away. If they get past that, there’s a room full of chairs, more comfortable than the chairs in the departure area and quieter, but nothing that would compare to anybody’s living room. If the passengers are lucky, there may be some pre-packaged pastries. But still, there’s a mystique to maintain. From the main lounge, there’s usually another imposing door through which few can pass: The first class lounge.
It continues on the plane as well. Those crammed in the back and fending for themselves for food are treated to announcements of meal services for the higher classes (even though anything else communicated in the first class cabin is done so without the PA), and announcements of their banishment from the first class bathrooms, which are airplane bathrooms like any other. Those in business class, like their coach class brethren, are treated to in flight magazines full of pictures of the beds they could use if only they had shelled out more money for first class. To further maintain the air of exclusivity, curtains are drawn across the aisle, or more crudely ropes, at the class boundaries to emphasize to those behind them the line they cannot cross.
Hotels are different. Unless there’s a problem, a fancy hotel will never challenge anybody’s right to be in its lobby, or generally even wandering the halls. If there were any chance that the person might be a hotel guest, questioning that would be incredibly rude, so they don’t. Hotels do have different classes of rooms, and different floors for those different classes. Classes of rooms start at the “superior” room and work their way up from there. A customer staying in a superior room will never be told that they’re missing something by not having booked a room of a higher class. When hotels have amenities available only to those in higher classes of rooms, they hide them where those in the lower class rooms will never see them, so as not to remind anybody that they aren’t getting the full service the hotel is proud of.
