Foreign Perspectives

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In big hotels towels and whatnot go “missing” and it’s classed as wastage basically because it would be pretty difficult to identify who’d made off with things as so many different people are involved.

However, in our place which is very much at the smaller end of the scale, there are very few people involved so it’s easy enough to identify the culprits. For example, just this morning a family checked out and made off with four of our towels. Sometimes you wonder why people do that but in this case it’s pretty clear: they had ordered four breakfasts but only ate one. Therefore in lieu of the three breakfasts which we’d charged them for they thought that they’d take two little towels and two big ones.

Net effect? Well, they’ve been charged EUR 40 and received an e-mail letting them know we’ll refund it if we get the towels back next week.

Now, what they’re going to say is that they didn’t do it and obviously it must have been our cleaning person. Well, as it happens I’m the person who both puts the towels into the rooms and takes them out again. I put six in and took two out therefore they took the other four.

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That’s one of the negative comments that we received recently. Slightly ironic though in that the comment was from a German family of which only one of the four could speak any French and he couldn’t speak much.

However, we’ve now reached the point where we expect that French guests will criticize us for not being French. At least that is if they come from the Dordogne where we can understand their opposition to English as it’s often treated by the English as though it were the far south of England. Somewhat more peculiar though are those from Alsace who are historically German of course but who are, by now, more French than the French with a lot more depth to their French ancestry.

What’s also been a feature this year is that we’ve had a LOT more Germans, Dutch and Spanish than normal and have around 90% non-French for quite extended periods sometimes. That’s given rise to criticisms from some of the French guests that French isn’t being spoken in the dining room or rather that English is being used by everyone else but them.

That’s something that we’d never thought about before. After all, in the majority of hotels around the world, it’s English that’s used between guests of different nationalities and, on the whole, it’s the language you’d most commonly hear during breakfast. Yet, in France the French expect the most common language to be French. Weird.

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Although you’re getting a product from a restaurant, restaurants are very much in the service sector and therefore “value” is judged largely on service criteria which are generally a little peculiar.

For example, whilst you can obviously tell that, say, a brick is of higher quality than another brick at the same price through such things as the material used, how well it’s finished, and so on, for services it’s often the case that people will value a more expensive “product” more simply because it is more expensive. Thus, when people are considering two restaurants that seem otherwise similar they may well go to the one with the higher prices on the basis that they’re getting better quality, at least until they’ve had the chance to actually try out the offering.

In France, the two way pull between people wanting to get good value whilst they also get good food has a peculiar effect. Typically you’ll see extremely low “menu” prices which are there to pull in the customers yet when they get inside, anything deviating at all from that menu can result in a total bill that’s substantially more than the menu price. Locally we find that people assume that lowish prices are low simply because the restaurant is using pre-heated food (very common locally) so if they want a decent meal they avoid anywhere with prices that seem “too low” which, of course, has the effect that quite ordinary restaurants end up having to charge what would be very much over the top prices elsewhere just to indicate that they are cooking the food fresh.

Ironically, those high prices don’t produce the high level of service that you’d expect elsewhere so in practice it’s actually quite poor value on offer in comparison to comparable restaurants elsewhere. Having said that, low service levels are generally the norm in France so in comparison to other comparable French businesses they’re fine.

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